With his video works, John Akomfrah creates comprehensive audiovisual narratives, conveying impressions that are loud and quiet, poetic and immediate at the same time. With his complex works, for which he combines archive material and new recordings, he expands the aesthetics of the documentary and at the same time questions traditional narratives and their modes of representation. The exhibition catalog traces these narratives for the three video installations presented. A detailed interview with the artist enables readers to further explore Akomfrah's approach and to understand the discourses and questions underlying his works, historical developments and upheavals of our time, which he reflects on. In addition, a further text explores the significance and idea of the archive for Akomfrah's Œuve, whose work itself now represents a kind of new, unconventional and open archive.

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Immerse yourself in John Akomfrah's visually stunning worlds, follow his own thoughts and explore the multi-layered and profound, complex but also often associative references that he creates with his works.

CATALOG John Akomfrah. A Space of Empathy edited by Julia Grosse and Sebastian Baden, with contributions by Julia Grosse and Nelly Y. Pinkrah, an interview with the artist, and a foreword by Sebastian Baden, director of the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, German-English edition, 120 pages, approx. 130 illustrations, 21.5 x 27.5 cm, hardcover, Archive Books, ISBN 978-3-949973-44-4, 29 € (SCHIRN), 34 € (bookstores)