'John Akomfrah: The Unfinished Conversation' at Kunstmuseum Ravensburg, Germany

24 July 2025

From 25 July – 2 November 2025, Kunstmuseum Ravensburg presents John Akomfrah's film installation The Unfinished Conversation. The film is a moving homage to the influential cultural theorist and sociologist Stuart Hall (1932, Kingston, JM–2014, London, GB). Hall's undogmatic thinking on racism, class, and identity remains groundbreaking today. At the heart of Akomfrah's multi-layered, audiovisual montage is his mentor and friend's conviction that identity and belonging are not static and unchanging givens that can be reduced to an ethnic origin, but rather components of an ongoing "unfinished conversation."

John Akomfrah, co-founder of the influential London-based Black Audio Film Collective (BAFC), has gained international acclaim for his complex montages of images and audio. In The Unfinished Conversation, Akomfrah unfolds a multi-perspective panorama on three screens, interweaving archival footage of Stuart Hall, the founder of Cultural Studies, with political events in Britain and world history. Akomfrah's haunting film installation invites us to reflect on the way we view ourselves and others.

Find out more via Kunstmuseum Ravensburg.

Image: Exhibition view of John Akomfrah, The Unfinished Conversation, 2012 at Kunstmuseum Ravensburg, 2025, three-channel video installation, 7.1 sound, 45 min. 48 sec. © Smoking Dogs Films, Courtesy Smoking Dogs Films and Kunstmuseum Ravensburg. Photography by Wynrich Zlomke.