This year’s Britain’s national pavilion at the Venice Biennale began with video from the Tudor court that remembers the death of a British-Nigerian man, David Oluwale, who drowned in a Yorkshire river after being beaten by local police in 1969.

Along the way, in the Ghanaian film-maker Sir John Akomfrah’s exhibition, comes a sumptuously told visual and auditory story.

“It’s a project on memory and water functions for me as a very resonant image of memory. How it works, where it goes, and the form that it takes in our lives.” says****John Akomfrah.

The Ghanaian founder of Black Audio Film Collective said he would have laughed if someone had said he’d someday be in the pavilion

John Akomfrah, artist, British pavilion: “I mean, this feels like a very significant moment for artists of color. Because I’m in the British pavilion. Next to me is a French one that’s with an artist, Julien, who I love a lot, of African origin. And then next to me is a Canadian pavilion that has a biracial artist, again of African heritage. So that’s certainly not happened before, that three major pavilions have artists of color, inhabiting, occupied, making work in them. And that feels like a breakthrough.”

There are 88 national pavilions in the city’s public gardens featured in this year’s Venice Biennale, the world’s largest and most prominent art event . Benin, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Senegal, Timor-Leste and Panama are taking part for the first time.