‘Even though I’m an artist, I feel strange in galleries...’
People have flocked to see Larry Achiampong’s exhibition at BALTIC with its films, flags and video games, DAVID WHETSTONE met an artist who admits to feeling “strange” in art galleries
AS a boy, recalls Larry Achiampong, his mother occasionally took him and his siblings to work with her, cleaning London offices before their occupants arrived.
The experience is recreated in his film installation, The Expulsion, with its executive trappings, bin bags and vacuum cleaners.
In the voiceover he recounts how they sometimes went by bus, sometimes in her “silver-blue bashed out ’81 Metro”, becoming some of the early morning “faces of manual labour hidden from the white collar types”.
As his exhibition was being set up, Larry talked a good bit about his mother.
She appears in one of his films, Sunday’s Best, which explores the relationship between Christianity and colonialism with footage from a Ghanaian community church and its Roman Catholic equivalent.
“If she could, I think she’d have avoided that (the early morning cleaning excursions), but the reality was she was a single mum and had to raise us and make ends meet,” he reflected.
“But also, she did this to teach us about the harsh realities of the world.
“She would say to me and my siblings, ‘If you don’t want to be working here like this, make sure books are your best friends.’
“This desire for a better future for us contrasted with her childhood when, unfortunately, she didn’t get an education.”
Surveying the second floor Gaming Room, which is diverting many BALTIC visitors before they reach Larry’s main exhibition on the floor above, you might conclude it was video games that became Larry’s friends.
Smiling, he admitted as much. This was a “specially curated” collection of video games, he said, the ones he had loved – and still loves – and that helped to make him the artist he is today.
Having grown up in the 1980s and ’90s, he remembered the media debates about this new entertainment format and worries expressed under his own roof.
“My mum was concerned at the time that video games could melt your brain or what have you.
“But I think where we were, in Bethnal Green, she was happy that we weren’t hanging out on the street.”
Picture, he said, “a lower working class black boy in an environment where you’re being stopped and searched by police and even arrested because of your race”.
These things happened to him but video games provided some solace.
“Maybe it sounds weird but being able to enter zones in a Mario game or a Sonic game made me feel free, that I could affect things much more.
“The younger version of me would use this to escape.
“But for me there was a lot of education that came with playing games like Metal Gear Solid, for example, which talks about chemical warfare, the human genome, the complexity of genes and hereditary natures and things like that.
“Of course, there are games you just play to enjoy, whether it’s Mario Kart or Super Smash Bros.
“But they’re all important to me. There are so many conversations that flow across the genres.”
The Gaming Room, popular at the exhibition’s first showing at Turner Contemporary in Margate (and now here), was a chance to showcase that.
“If it turns into something like a crèche cum chill-out spot, I don’t mind. That’s what it’s there for.”
Suspended above the entrance are
three figures in flying suits, seemingly pointing the way to the third floor where you’ll find more of their ilk.
They’re part of Larry’s Relic Traveller project, inspired by Brexit – which he didn’t want but saw coming – and the “separatist politics” which he imagines could send the West into decline just as Africa starts to profit from a proposed scheme to ease cross-border travel.
Relic Traveller comprises films, the pilots in their flying suits and giant flags in the Pan-African colours of green, black, red and gold that represent the continent and its diaspora.
Larry said his mother took time to educate her kids about their Ghanaian heritage and he was now doing the same with his (Reliquary 2, part of the Relic Traveller series and with animation by Wumi Olaosebikan, was made during the pandemic as a “spoken letter” to his children).
At school, he remembered, history had embraced the Anglo Saxons but there was nothing about the Akan people of West Africa whose language his mother taught them.
“The only thing I was taught about Ghana was when the slave trade was spoken about.”
Even then it had been in relation to the Industrial Revolution rather than colonisation. “There was no talk of calamity or holocaust.”
But young Larry was not subdued in class, as he recalled with a laugh.
“My mum will tell you I was very vocal as a kid. I was the one who couldn’t keep my mouth shut, always asking why this and why that.
“That’s part of me. I like to wander around the world I’m living in and I feel I have some ideas to share creatively in that respect.”
He gravitated towards art, his mother mollified once she realised there was an academic path to such a goal.
While lacking the “inherited privilege” of some art school peers, never having been taken to museums “and all that stuff”, Larry has made a success of it.
His beautifully displayed BALTIC work is rich in ideas and content, the visuals arresting, the language poetic and the music, much of it his own, beguiling.
It speaks eloquently of an inquiring mind drawn to big questions and inspired by popular culture.
Detention, a series of chalkboards with slogans such as “Our Lives Are Political Because Our Bodies Are”, is a light-hearted nod to Bart Simpson and the opening sequence of the TV show.
Wayfinder is the title of both the exhibition and its most recent exhibit, an 85-minute film which you can view from seating made to represent ‘broken Britain’.
Shot during the strictures of Covid-19, it is set in a near future – and during a different pandemic – and charts a journey across England by a girl known as the Wanderer (played by Perside Rodrigues).
Drawing on aspects of Larry’s life story, it touches on class, racism and the meaning of home. The first of its six ‘chapters’ was filmed on Hadrian’s Wall.
Mysterious and melancholy, the Wanderer’s odyssey features encounters with Mataio Austin Dean’s ‘griot’, singing haunting folk songs in the manner of a West African musician and storyteller.
Anyone who gets to this point via Mario Kart must agree that this is an exhibition with multiple entry points.
“To be honest, even though I’m an artist, I still feel strange in galleries,” said Larry. “They’re contested spaces. Just opening up a conversation and making a space for people to feel welcome means a lot.”
Wayfinder can be seen at BALTIC until October 29.