COLLATERAL ECHOES

About The Artist - Baff Akoto

Baff Akoto is a British Ghanaian artist working across multiple mediums. His solo exhibition Collateral Echoes brings together works which navigate the politics of remembrance, the nature of collective digital memorialisation and legacies of power in post-colonial Britain.

Raised in London and Accra, Akoto invites us to explore how acts of witnessing, both physical and mediated, are charged with conflicting truths, ethics, and emotions.

His work is in active dialogue with cultural theorists like Paul Gilroy, who describes the Black diaspora as a space of rupture, trauma and longing; and the late Stuart Hall, who frames the Black experience as one of containment and resistance.

Grounded in a distinctly post-modern sensibility, Akoto’s approach fragments and reframes, inviting us to consider how harm circulates not just through bodies and institutions, but through images, technologies, and silence. As such, he confronts us with the ambiguity of meaning in this digital age, challenging us to consider what it means to remember without rancour or violence as we carry the humanity of those killed into our collective future.

About COLLATERAL ECHOES

Through layered imagery, Akoto’s work evokes the diasporic longing and fragmented belonging that Gilroy wrote of. COLLATERAL ECHOES, although rooted in trauma, is brimming with moments of nurture, communion and care - continuing the enduring traditions and characteristics of African diasporic cultural resistance evidenced through centuries of artmaking across the Black Atlantic (Gilroy 1993).

Akoto’s fluent visual grammar, honed through years of working independently outside traditional cinema, reveals itself in the interplay of archive, performance and sound. His experimental approach to film, installation, and emerging technologies, sits at the intersection of the cinematic and the speculative.

He draws from his background in documentary and narrative film to create work that is not only poetic, but layered and emotionally precise, blurring the boundaries between the real, the imagined, and the unresolved. His use of spoken word builds a multivocal chorus of remembrance, resilience and endurance.

Combining the disciplines of film, extended reality, installation, sound and more, COLLATERAL ECHOES commemorates those Black and migrant Britons who have been disproportionately killed after police contact since 1969. By calling them into memory, he succeeds in bringing them vividly to life.

This version of the project honours Roger Sylvester, Sean Rigg, Kishni Mahay, Nuno Cardoso, Seni Lewis, Moauyed Bashir, David Oluwale, Leon Patterson, Adrian McDonald, Mzee Mohammed and Cynthia Jarret.

A deeply affecting, immersive exhibition, COLLATERAL ECHOES situates memory, mourning and resistance at the heart of the contemporary Black and immigrant British experience. In doing so, it confronts the persistent discrepancies and enduring biases of modern Britain, inherited from a celebrated colonial past which centred racialisation, in service of expansionist mercantilism, at its very core.

This work merges the poetic with the political in addressing the families and communities of the deceased. These acts of violence continue to reverberate long after those killed have been laid to rest. With a disproportionate number of those killed after police contact in this country hailing from intersecting Black and immigrant backgrounds, COLLATERAL ECHOES contemplates how power is wielded. By whom? And dares to question if all British lives are equally valued by this state we call home.

In a post-Brexit climate where anti-immigrant rhetoric is emboldened and nationalism is on the rise, Akoto’s work feels acutely urgent. The characteristics of racialisation and immigrant life intersect in ways that are disproportionately deadly, a reality made visible in the work’s emotional depth and political clarity. Even as it draws on events from the past, sometimes decades ago, the installation speaks directly to the nation’s current condition, including 2024’s racially charged, anti-immigrant nationwide riots and the ever expanding political “hostile environment” that spawned them. The work does not simply document the past. It exposes its continuity with the present and challenges us to confront the consequences of that denial.

Akoto draws our attention to the cultural, social and psychological ramifications of racialised and immigrant life in the carceral state. We are invited to sit with our discomfort, to recognise what has been denied or disavowed, and to imagine new vocabularies for repair.

Rather than simply documenting loss, this work reclaims grief as a site of struggle and survival. It honours the lives of the fallen while calling us to account. In doing so, COLLATERAL ECHOES becomes an urgent act of witness and offering to the families, communities, and all those living under the weight of state-sanctioned violence, as well as a provocation to those who refuse to see.

In sum, we are challenged to reflect on the ways grief and the trauma of loss are redeemed through resistance, cultural continuity and the sheer triumph of survival.

This text was written by Stella Dadzie in collaboration with Nana Opoku and Gail Lewis, whose eloquent analysis of Akoto’s work informed every sentence.