Larry Achiampong’s solo and collaborative projects employ imagery, aural and visual archives, live performance, and sound to explore ideas surrounding class, cross-cultural and post-digital identity. With works that examine his communal and personal heritage—in particular, the intersection between pop culture and the postcolonial position—Achiampong crate-digs the vaults of history. These investigations examine constructions of ‘the self’ by splicing the audible and visual materials of personal and interpersonal archives, offering multiple perspectives that reveal entrenched socio-political contradictions in contemporary society.
Achiampong has exhibited, performed, and presented projects within the UK and abroad including: Westminster Station, Tate Britain/Modern, London; The Institute For Creative Arts, Cape Town; The British Film Institute, London; David Roberts Art Foundation, London; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen; Bokoor African Popular Music Archives Foundation, Accra; Logan Center Exhibitions, Chicago; Prospect New Orleans; Diaspora Pavilion – 57th Venice Biennale; Somerset House, London; and the 2019 Venice and Singapore Biennales.
Achiampong is a 2018 Jarman Award nominated artist; a 2019 Paul Hamlyn Award recipient for Visual Arts; and in 2020 received the Stanley Picker Fellowship, along with artist Dani Amiss. He completed a BA in Mixed Media Fine Art at University of Westminster, London, in 2005 and an MA in Sculpture at The Slade School of Fine Art, London, in 2008. He lives and works in Essex, and has been a tutor on the Photography MA programme at Royal College of Art, London, since 2016. Achiampong currently serves on the Board of Trustees at Iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts) and is represented by Copperfield, London.
David Blandy makes work that slips between performance and video, digital and analogue, investigating the stories and cultural forces that inform and influence our lives. Collaboration is central to his practice, examining communal and personal heritage and interdependence. With research spanning multiple forms of archive, from historic texts to academic archives, archaeology and ecological theory, Twitch streams and film archives, Blandy weaves poetic works that explore the complexities of the contemporary subject. Blandy projects involve complex installations, performance, writing, gaming, and sound.
He was nominated for the Film London Jarman award with Larry Achiampong in 2018. He has exhibited and performed at venues nationally and worldwide such as: Towner Gallery, Eastbourne; Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea; Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge; Art Tower Mito, Tokyo; Kiasma Contemporary Art Museum, Helsinki; Tate Modern, London; The Baltic, Gateshead; Turner Contemporary, Margate; Spike Island, Bristol; Künstlerhaus Stuttgart; MoMA PS1, New York; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai.
