Akeem Smith
Production Support Programme
Production Support until 22 Oct 2023
Still 145 days
As an official partner of Paris+ par Art Basel, the Galeries Lafayette group supports the Emerging Galleries sector, for which the Fondation offers an annual exhibition grant to an artist. Akeem Smith benefits from the production of a work - an original video in the continuity of his research - as well as its presentation at the Foundation during Paris+ par Art Basel.
His work seeks to erase the distinctions between art, fashion and anthropology, thereby challenging the standards of Western cultural iconography. He is interested in the economics of image production in its political, social and commercial forms, and the role of the artist as archivist. For the past decade, Akeem Smith has been collecting a growing archive of photographs and VHS videos that document dancehall culture from the 1980s to the 2000s. His recent work celebrates this popular Jamaican movement, largely absent from institutional archives.
Cover image credit: Dovecote, Akeem Smith, 2020
