One of the most talked-about works at the last Venice Biennale was John Akomfrah’s Vertigo Sea. This immersive 48-minute three-screen film installation deftly collages sublime images of marine life from the BBC’s natural history unit with often excruciating archive footage of whale and polar bear hunting and the slave trade, along with new sequences shot in Norway, Skye and the Faroe Islands. It propelled the 58-year-old Akomfrah to a new level of art world attention, and now it is having its UK premiere at the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol where it will be on show until 10 April.

The starting point for Vertigo Sea was a BBC radio interview with a group of young Nigerian migrants who had survived an illegal crossing of the Mediterranean. The piece opens with their voice-over account of climbing onto a tuna cage when their ship took in water, before it expands into a multi-layered meditation on mankind’s relationship with the ocean. Akomfrah describes it as “a coming together of narratives that would not otherwise be in the same place” – and it is also accompanied by an equally rich soundscape. “I wanted to see whether my interest in the aquatic world and especially the humpback whale can be connected with stories about contemporary refugee ships, which can then in turn, be connected to earlier people trying to do pretty much the same thing, which is to escape somewhere,” he says.

Accompanying Vertigo Sea and covering many of the same themes is Tropikos, another film work which was only completed this year and which has been commissioned by the Arts Council as part of its 70th birthday celebrations. Situated in Plymouth and the Tamar Valley which is where the 16th century slave trade began, this single screen “experimental costume drama” connects the waterways of the South West and the bleak consequences of Britain’s earliest sorties into the West African coast. Consisting entirely of new footage, like Vertigo Sea it is both sumptuous and deeply disquieting, unfolding in a series of beautifully composed tableaux vivant in which actors wearing both African and Tudor costume introduce exotic African plunder to the damp English countryside.

Next week Akomfrah is further consolidating his art world status with a debut show at London’s Lisson Gallery, including two new films shot in the Bahamas and Greece which also deal with issues of global migration both historical and contemporary – or as he puts it “look at perennial subjects in new ways”. Yet all this recent acclaim should not obscure the fact that the Ghana-born British artist who came to Britain aged four and describes himself as an “Afro Brit” is also highly respected as a film maker whose work for television and cinema – as well as for art spaces – has spanned over three decades.

Akomfrah’s films have been shown at Cannes, Toronto and Sundance film festivals as well as Documenta 11, the Liverpool Biennial, Tate and MoMA New York. He is also widely known as a founding member of the influential British media group Black Audio Film Collective, which was operational between 1982 and 1998 and was renowned for pioneering the use of innovative documentary and film essay formats as well as for legitimising black voices. Handsworth Songs, made in 1985 after the race riots in Birmingham and London, remains a classic and is still ominously relevant; never more so than when it was screened to packed audiences at Tate Modern after the Tottenham riots in 2011. This collaborative ethos and commitment to grappling with issues of race and migration is perpetuated Smoking Dogs Films, the production company which Akomfrah and two members of the BAFC co-founded in 1998.

So why the current move to into the art gallery? “I felt as though it was the right time to sidestep the deluge of demands of television and look at other ways in which to reboot my ongoing obsessions in the light of recent decades,” he states. “What is a migrant? What is an outsider? What’s our relationship with art history? What’s the role of memory? These are all ongoing questions that have always animated the work I’ve done for both the cinema and television, but they seemed especially pertinent to the gallery space.”

John Akomfrah: Vertigo Sea is at thew Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol until 10 April; and at the Lisson Gallery from 22 January until 5 March