Akeem Smith
One last cry
Exhibition from 18 Oct 2023
In 15 days
Free entry, no booking
Monday 11am - 7pm
Tuesday Closed
Wednesday 11am - 7pm
Thursday 11am - 9pm
Friday 11am - 7pm
Saturday 11am - 7pm
Sunday 11am - 7pm
For the past thirteen years, Smith, who grew up in the Waterhouse district of Kingston, Jamaica, has been collecting a burgeoning archive of amateur photographs and videos. The dancehall culture, a Jamaican musical scene largely absent from official and institutional archives, has found new visibility and recognition in the artist's work, celebrating identities, places and spaces that are as unique as they are singular.
Conceived as a temple dedicated to the celebration of forgotten times and beings, the exhibition brings together a video installation, Dovecote, and several urns. Dovecote, composed of decorative welded metal doors that function on the island both as a deterrent to domestic crime and as signifiers to wealth, contains a video work showing images of women looking into the camera. Smith chooses women with ambiguous attitudes, whose emotions and inner states are impossible to read. Named after the Dovecote Memorial Park in Spanish Town, Jamaica, the audio score is a collage of samples taken from funeral archives.
The new sculptures, created in the workshops of Lafayette Anticipations, take the form of urns celebrating the memory of a remarkable moment, an emotion, a lapsed intention, captured on one of these evening gatherings.
Through this project, Smith looks at the question of identity as it is written, created and shaped in dancehall culture, using the archives as a "broader and living exploration of a community rooted in celebration".
For the first edition of Paris+ by Art Basel in 2022, the Galeries Lafayette Group has chosen to support the Emerging Galleries sector and, to offer the artist Akeem Smith the opportunity to produce a work with the help of the Fondation's production teams.
Curator: Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel
In partnership with Libération
Cover image credit: Dovecote, Akeem Smith, 2020
Free entry, no booking
Monday 11am - 7pm
Tuesday Closed
Wednesday 11am - 7pm
Thursday 11am - 9pm
Friday 11am - 7pm
Saturday 11am - 7pm
Sunday 11am - 7pm
