John Akomfrah: ‘Progress can cause profound suffering’

For the British artist, global warming, the subject of his ambitious new video installation, is a process rooted in technology and exploitationJohn Akomfrah grew up in the 1960s, in the shadow of Battersea power station in south London. As a child, he remembers “feeling as if I was enveloped in something whenever I played on the street. You could sense it in the air, you felt it and saw it, whatever was emanating from the huge chimneys. We were being poisoned as we played, but no