John Akomfrah

For John Akomfrah’s solo debut in China, the celebrated artist and filmmaker presents a three-channel film installation, titled The Airport (2016), at the South Gallery of Lisson Beijing. For the past 40 years, Akomfrah has challenged official narratives around slavery, Black identity, imperialism and the environment with boundary-pushing films that are timely today. The Airport (2016) is a surreal meditation on the significance of empire and the ghosts which linger in collective consciousness – both physically through architecture and metaphorically through traces of previous generations. Against the backdrop of the recent economic and migrant crises in contemporary Greece, the film is shot in an abandoned airport outside Athens, where a cast of displaced and anachronistic characters wait for an airplane that we suspect will never come.