MoAD & SFMOMA present a screening of LAST ANGEL OF HISTORY (John Akomfrah, 45 minutes, 1996), followed by a virtual conversation with filmmaker John Akomfrah and Key Jo Lee, MOAD’s Chief of Curatorial Affairs & Public Programs.

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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.

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In dialogue, with the exhibition, the Limitless film series brings together award-winning films from across the African Diaspora, including the United States, 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.

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Together, the exhibition and film series offer an invitation to think beyond constraint and to imagine new possibilities for being, becoming, and belonging. Select screenings will feature guest filmmakers and speakers, offering audiences a chance to engage more deeply with the stories and ideas shaping this dynamic cinematic experience.

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About the Film

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John Akomfrah, director of Seven Songs of Malcolm X, returns with an engaging and searing examination of the hitherto unexplored relationships between Pan-African culture, science fiction, intergalactic travel, and rapidly progressing computer technology.

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This 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.

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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 the 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.

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The Last Angel of History Trailer

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About the Speakers

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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 twenty-year body of work is among the most distinctive in the contemporary British art world, and his cultural influence continues today.

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As a teen, Akomfrah was a Super 8 filmmaker and enthusiast. With several underground ciné-clubs in London, he helped bring Asian and European arthouse cinema, militant cinema from Africa and Latin America, and American independent and avant-garde cinema to minority audiences.

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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.

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Since 1987, Akomfrah's work has been shown in galleries including Documenta (Germany), the De Balie (Holland), Centre George Pompidou (France), the Serpentine and Whitechapel Galleries (UK); and The Museum of Modern Art (USA). A major new retrospective of Akomfrah's gallery-based work with the Black Audio Film Collective premiered at the FACT and Arnolfini galleries (UK) and is now making a tour of galleries and museums throughout Europe. In 2000, Akomfrah was awarded the Gold Digital Award at the Cheonju International Film Festival, South Korea, for his innovative use of digital technology.

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He has been an artist-in-residence at universities including, most recently, New York University, and a jury member at festivals including, most recently the BFI London Film Festival, UK, and the Tarifa International Film Festival, Spain. He has lectured at institutions including CalArts, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the London Institute. He was a member of the Arts Council Film Committee, and Governor of the British Film Institute from 2001 through 2007. John Akomfrah 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.

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Key Jo Lee is Chief of Curatorial Affairs & 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.

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Her recent projects include UNBOUND: Art, Blackness & 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.

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