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This unique evening will begin at Walker Art Gallery with the opportunity to see Sir John Akomfrah's new work, Listening All Night To The Rain (free entrance 10:00 - 17:00).
Join community activist Nasra Elliott on a guided walking tour of the city centre, exploring histories related to transatlantic slavery and racial discrimination. The tour starts at Walker Art Gallery and finishes at FACT at 18:00.
Nasra Elliott is a community historian, engagement producer, and public history practitioner based in Liverpool. She works with the International Slavery Museum, National Museums Liverpool, where she develops research-informed programmes exploring Liverpool's connections to transatlantic slavery, empire, and their contemporary legacies. Her work brings together archival research, community knowledge, and lived experience to create accessible and engaging public history projects.
50 mins
During the long hot summer of 1981 Toxteth, Liverpool was to become the site of the most turbulent eruption of civil disorder to take place on mainland Britain this century. Over a period of three days 500 people were arrested and several hundred police officers and members of the public were injured. The documentary is told from the perspectives of local people who reflect on the events that led up to the riots.
58 mins 33 secs
Handsworth Songs explores race and civil disorder in 1980s Britain and the inner city riots of 1985. It focuses on the civil disturbances of September and October 1985 in the Birmingham district of Handsworth and in the urban centres of London. The ‘Songs’ in the title do not reference musicality but instead invoke the idea of documentary as a poetic montage of associations familiar from the British documentary cinema of John Grierson and Humphrey Jennings.
Handsworth Songs won Britain’s most prestigious award for Documentaries, the British Film Institute Grierson Award for Best Documentary in 1986.
Memory Room 451 (1997), John Akomfrah.
Sir John Akomfrah has a longstanding connection with FACT. In 2007, FACT presented The Ghosts of Songs, the first major retrospective of the Black Audio Film Collective, the influential film and media arts group co-founded by Akomfrah. Handsworth Songs was one of many John Akomfrah films screened in this exhibition, along with several archival works and documents.
The Walker is currently showcasing Listening All Night To The Rain (16 May – 31 August 2026) by British artist Sir John Akomfrah. Commissioned for the British Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024, the work is a series of multi-channel video installations exploring diasporic experiences in Britain, reflecting on pivotal moments in colonial and post-colonial history. Its display at the Walker, particularly the intervention on the Gallery’s portico, creates dialogue with these histories. As the Walker marks its 150th anniversary in 2027 we hope it will pave the way for future conversations.
Header image: Handsworth Songs (1986).
All images are (c) John Akomfrah and Courtesy Smoking Dogs Films and Lisson Gallery.
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