Akeem Smith
One last cry
Exhibition from 18 Oct to 20 Nov 2023
2 years and 11 months ago
The artist has compiled a collection of artefacts, including VHS tapes, rare photos and clothing, from various Afro-Caribbean social scenes connected to Dancehall, a musical movement born in Jamaica in the late ‘70s. Smith revisits these objects to offer them new life, and to preserve what once was.
Smith’s formal approach is informed by the “architecture of necessity” (Ernesto Oroza, For an Architecture of Necessity and Disobedience), a type of informal construction produced in response to individual or collective needs. His work thus celebrates customised alterations made in neighbourhoods and homes in response to political and economical restrictions.
The exhibition presents works made of salvaged materials from Kingston, Jamaica. These transplanted shanty fragments, with their origins still visible, are transformed and embellished with fine details, reconfigured with new purpose.
In the staircases, the visitor is accompanied by a soundtrack made of samples pulled from Smith’s personal recordings. The exhibition brings together a new series of sculptures, the result of a production residency at Lafayette Anticipations, with Dovecote, a 2020 two-channel video work. Both works enable resurrect forms and hold a sacred function as protective vessels, testaments of Smith’s practice of archival custodianship.
Curator: Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel
In partnership with Télérama
With special thanks to the gallery Heidi, Berlin.
Cover image credit: Dovecote, Akeem Smith, 2020 © Pierre Antoine
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For the first edition of Paris+ par Art Basel in 2022, the Galeries Lafayette group has supported the Galeries Emergentes sector. Akeem Smith has been the first artist selected for a residency at Lafayette Anticipations, realising new works with the support of the Fondation’s production teams.
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.
Following a residency at the foundation, Akeem Smith presents his exhibition One Last Cry at Lafayette Anticipations in 2023.