John Akomfrah’s British pavilion at Venice Biennale review – a magnificent and awful journey

The artist’s nightmare of colonial exile, ecology and globalisation – recurring endlessly over six interconnected video installations – leaves you unsettled, unhinged and gasping for air

Trucks pass by spewing clouds of insecticide that fumigate a poor neighbourhood. A small child, stoic and resigned, gets the treatment too. A carriage clock and an old watch drown on a riverbed, along with old master drawings and paintings distorted by the rills in the stream, and avuncular 1970s TV ecologist David Bellamy explains global warming in some old degraded footage. A container ship founders, its cargo shifting. Sound and image do all the work in John Akomfrah’s Listening All Night to the Rain, which fills the British pavilion at the Venice Biennale. I was there two hours and still feel I’ve only seen snatches, the story constantly slipping away from me and leading me on, via continual swerves and jumps and shifts, from moment to moment, screen to screen and room to room. Overwhelmed, I’m left gasping.

As soon as the eye settles on one thing, we are swept away again. A man sleeps beside pictures of boy soldiers. One of them once might have been him. Jellyfish rise through water in green light, and a white woman in pearls and gloves waves from a car at dutiful crowds of black faces. A man waits at a lonely bus stop in the Scottish highlands beside a road sign warning of otters crossing. How do we go from here to images of Patrice Lumumba, first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, before his assassination? A waving placard tells us that colonialists are doomed.