Larry Achiampong: OPEN SEASON

September 16 - October 30, 2016

Larry Achiampong: OPEN SEASON installation view. Photo by Clare Britt

Opening reception: September 21, 2016, 6–8pm featuring an audio-visual performance by the artist

Working across sound, video, performance, and installation, London-based artist Larry Achiampong (b.1984) explores shifting notions of identity and belonging in our post-digital age. OPEN SEASON is the artist’s first international solo exhibition and features works from the past three years. The exhibition includes a new version of works titled #OPENSEASON, based on Achiampong’s ongoing series of blackboard drawings, as well as Sunday's Best - a newly commissioned video piece.

At the heart of Achiampong’s practice is an exploration of the different cultural spheres that he inhabits as a British-Ghanaian artist, deeply entrenched in the oftentimes anonymous and fluid citizenry of the digital realm. Mining a plethora of images, sounds, and texts from his personal archives and those freely available on digital search engines, social media platforms, and virtual environments including Facebook, YouTube, and Wikipedia, Achiampong explores the ways in which mass information sharing have afforded multiple histories and cultural identities to emerge. OPEN SEASON presents works that consider how belief systems within the diaspora are inflected by colonial influences. Delving into the virtual spaces of everyday life and drawing on the artist’s personal experiences, other works on view tease out the ironies of political solidarity forged through fleeting digital interactions.

Larry Achiampong: OPEN SEASON is presented by Logan Center Exhibitions and curated by Yesomi Umolu, Exhibitions Curator. Additional support provided by Arts Council England and the British Council.

Larry Achiampong’s solo and collaborative projects have been exhibited, performed, and presented at the EVA International, Limerick; Tate Britain and Tate Modern, London; Hauptbahnhof (dOCUMENTA 13), Kassel; The British Film Institute, London; Modern Art Oxford, Oxford; New Art Exchange, Nottingham; SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin; Bokoor African Popular Music Archives Foundation, Accra; and The Mistake Room, Los Angeles. Recent residencies include Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle; Praksis, Oslo; Sound & Music and The British Library, London, and Wysing Arts Center, Cambridge.
Larry Achiampong completed a BA in Mixed Media Fine Art at University of Westminster (2005) and an MA in Sculpture at Slade School of Fine Art (2008). Achiampong is currently a recipient of the Artsadmin Artists' Bursary. He lives and works in London.
Finding Fanon Film Screening and Artist Talk
Friday September 16, 2016, 7pm | Stony Island Arts Bank | 6760 S. Stony Island Ave | Chicago, IL 60649
Join us at the Stony Island Arts Bank for a screening of two films in the Finding Fanon (2015–present) trilogy followed by a conversation with artists Larry Achiampong and David Blandy, moderated by Yesomi Umolu, Logan Center Exhibitions Curator.
Finding Fanon is inspired by the lost plays of the radical philosopher, writer, and humanist Franz Fanon (1925–1961). Throughout the trilogy, Achiampong and Blandy negotiate Fanon’s commentary on race and decolonization in the early 20th century, including its intersection with migration, industrialization, and socio-economic disparities in our globalized and technologically driven society. Finding Fanon 1 uses still and moving images drawn from personal archives, news media, music videos, and Google searches to reveal how the artists’s familial histories intertwine with British colonialism. Set within the simulated environment of the in-game video editor of Grand Theft Auto 5, Finding Fanon 2 combines art-house cinema with digital culture’s Machinima to explore the postcolonial condition.
Presented by Logan Center Exhibitions and Black Cinema House, and co-sponsored by the Nicholson Center for British Studies. Additional support provided by Arts Council England and the British Council.
About David Blandy
David Blandy (b. 1976) has established his terrain through a series of investigations into the cultural forces that inform and influence him, ranging from his love of hip hop and soul, to computer games and manga. His works slip between performance and video, reality and construct, using references sampled from the wide, disparate sources that provide his (and our own) individualist sense of self. He has exhibited at venues nationally and worldwide such as Bloomberg Space, London, UK; The Exchange, Newlyn Art Gallery, UK; Kiasma Contemporary Art Museum, Helsinki, Finland; The Baltic, Gateshead; Turner Contemporary, Margate; Spike Island, Bristol; Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Germany; MoMA PS1, New York, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai, China. He is represented by Seventeen Gallery, London.
Opening Reception
Wednesday September 21, 2016, 6-8pm | Logan Center Gallery
Join us to celebrate the opening of Larry Achiampong: OPEN SEASON. Achiampong will deliver a live in-gallery performance that draws out a relationship between aspects of history embedded in various audio samples and the future worlds of videogame visuals.