The Last Angel of History

MoAD and SFMOMA present a screening of John Akomfrah’s The Last Angel of History (45 minutes, 1996), followed by a virtual conversation with Akomfrah and Key Jo Lee, MoAD’s chief of curatorial affairs and public programs.

With The Last Angel of History, visionary filmmaker and multimedia artist John Akomfrah shares an engaging and searing examination of the hitherto unexplored relationships between Pan-African culture, science fiction, intergalactic travel, and rapidly progressing computer technology. The cinematic essay posits science fiction (with tropes such as alien abduction, estrangement, and genetic engineering) as a metaphor for the Pan-African experience of forced displacement, cultural alienation, and otherness. Through the journey of a fictional “Data Thief” and interviews with figures like Sun Ra, George Clinton, DJ Spooky, actor Nichelle Nichols, astronaut Dr. Bernard A. Harris Jr, and writers Octavia Butler, Samuel R. Delaney, Greg Tate, and Ishmael Reed, this visually exciting film connects Pan-African culture to science fiction, music, technology, and intergalactic travel.

The screening is presented in conjunction with MoAD’s five-week screening series Limitless. MoAD’s groundbreaking exhibition UNBOUND: Art, Blackness, and the Universe invites audiences to experience Blackness as expansive, limitless, and cosmic, reaching beyond the boundaries of Earth into space, time, and imagination.

In dialogue with the exhibition, the Limitless film series brings together award-winning films from across the African Diaspora, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Brazil, the Caribbean, French Guiana, Nigeria, and Zambia. Spanning narrative, documentary, and experimental work, these films explore speculative futures, ancestral memory, science fiction, African mythology, and visionary figures such as Octavia Butler and George Clinton.

Watch the trailer for The Last Angel of History.

About the Speakers

Born in Accra, Ghana, in 1957 to radical political activist parents, John Akomfrah was widely recognized as one of the most influential figures of Black British culture in the 1980s. An artist, lecturer, and writer as well as a filmmaker, his 20-year body of work is among the most distinctive in the contemporary British art world, and his cultural influence continues today. In 1982, Akomfrah helped found the seminal, cine-cultural workshop the Black Audio Film Collective. He directed a broad range of work for the group, including fiction films, tape slides, single-screen gallery pieces, experimental videos, music videos, and documentaries. His work has been shown widely, and he has been an artist in residence and lecturer at a number of universities. He is currently a Governor of Film London, a visiting professor of film at the University of Westminster (United Kingdom), and an officer of the Order of the British Empire.
 
Key Jo Lee is chief of curatorial affairs and public programs at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), where she thinks with artists about Blackness, perception, cosmology, interior life, and the futures museums rarely know how to hold. With more than a decade in the field, her work lives at the intersection of curating, theory, and institution-building, asking how exhibitions do intellectual work and how care can be designed, not just declared. Her recent projects include UNBOUND: Art, Blackness, and the Universe and Liberatory Living: Protective Interiors and Radical Black Joy. Previously, she was associate curator of American Art at the Cleveland Museum of Art. She is the author of Perceptual Drift: Black Art and an Ethics of Looking, has written for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and holds dual MA and MPhil degrees in History of Art and African American Studies from Yale University.

Accessibility Information

Accessibility accommodations such as American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation and assisted listening devices are available upon request ten business days in advance.

Please email publicengagement@sfmoma.org, and we will do our best to fulfill your request.