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 exploitation

John 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 one spoke about it. The conversations in the pub tended to be about football rather than carbon monoxide poisoning.”

Fifty years on, the local has become the global. Akomfrah’s latest art work, Purple, is an immersive, six-channel video installation that attempts to evoke the incremental effects of climate change on our planet. Shot in 10 countries and drawing on archive footage, spoken word and music alongside often epic shots of contemporary landscapes that have been altered by global warming and rising temperatures, Purple eschews a linear narrative for an almost overwhelming montage of imagery and sound.

Related: John Akomfrah: 'I haven’t destroyed this country. There's no reason other immigrants would'