During lockdown in 2020, British-Ghanaian filmmaker John Akomfrah captured a world in crisis, enlisting friends and family to document their lives at home in black and white imagery. The resulting three-channel video installation, Five Murmurations, offers a profound reflection on a world in turmoil, blending pandemic-era realities with the global reckoning sparked by the Black Lives Matter movement.
On view through August 2025 at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C., the film’s crowdsourced footage offers a haunting snapshot in time and is something of a departure from the cinematic, high-resolution film projects for which Akomfrah is known.
The difference between this work and his other films could clearly be seen when Five Murmurations opened in 2023, at which time his 2017 film Purple was on view just down the street at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, marking a rare simultaneous showing of a single artist across two Smithsonian museums. The latter is a soaring meditation on climate change featuring stunning shots of gorgeous landscapes in Alaska, Greenland, Tahiti, and the Marquesas Islands in the South Pacific, among other locations. The production was nothing short of epic in its scale.
In Five Murmurations, Akomfrah—who represented the U.K. at this year’s Venice Biennale—was limited to more intimate scenes, of people at home. The footage is choppy, a series of frames made from high-resolution DPX files and still photographs, rather than seamlessly shot on top-of-the-line video cameras.
“The first 10 minutes of the film are literally what we were all experiencing, what it felt like at the start of the pandemic. There’s a lot of hand wash washing, and you’ll see spinning Covid cells,” senior curator at the Museum of African Art Karen E. Milbourne said in a tour of the exhibition.
The film debuted at London’s Lisson Gallery in 2021, and appeared at the Utrecht Centraal Museum in the Netherlands in 2022. It is made up of five chapters, or “murmurations,” inspired by the way flocks of birds come together in flight as a defensive measure against predators.
“In a murmuration, the birds sort of fly apart and come together. So the first coming together of all of these disparate elements, if you will, is the murder of George Floyd,” Milbourne said. “It’s everybody staring at their cell phones, looking at their laptops, watching what happened. We were all in these moments. And that really propelled this global response to the Black Lives Matter movement. So you start to see footage of that as well.”
In addition to images of these swirling avian formations, Five Mumurations includes details from art historical masterpieces The Conjurer (ca. 1502) by Hieronymus Bosch and The Lamentation Over the Dead Christ (ca. 1483) by Andrea Mantegna, as well as archival images of the execution of Che Guevara. Akomfrah also intersperses shots of printed text dissolving in liquids, with words and phrases like “living with danger,” “the audacity of love,” and “hope.”
Milbourne noted that the artist’s signature style is working with montage, a technique with which in Five Murmurations he’s “really been able to do is take these crises of postcolonial legacies and issues of social justice and tap into this essential core of them, showing the intersections between race and violence and the global pandemic.”
The film culminates in chilling ending, the imagery on screen becoming more abstracted with blooms of flashing light, as Akomfrah plays the audio recording of Floyd’s agonized final moments as he was strangled by the police.
“It really is the power of what art is. He’s able to capture what we all felt and bring the footage together. It is painful because it was a painful time, but it’s also a chance for us to recognize what one another went through,” Milbourne said. “It brings this utter clarity to the injustice we all recognize and need to change. For me, this piece is about what is the future we want to build.”
“John Akomfrah: Five Murmurations” is on view through August 24, 2025, at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, 950 Independence Avenue, SW, Washington, D.C.
