Larry Achiampong & David Blandy: The Grid

About

One picks over the detritus of the present digital age, with fractured identities, disposable bodies and disposable technology. The other concentrates on the mythologies of racism and conflict in the history of the development of science and in high fantasy. As the title suggests, both exhibitions site moving image within a literal framework, alluding simultaneously to the default virtual wireframe and the underpinnings of society.

The room at Seventeen will feature two films on the mythologies of racism, “The Wall and the Incongruous” and “A Terrible Fiction”. The Wall and The Incongruous uses Hadrian’s Wall as a key to examine the idea of the border, building a High Fantasy fable of a land that was so lost in its hubris that it sealed itself off from its neighbours, in the end starving itself. A Terrible Fiction references the history of the theory of evolution, and the relationship between Darwin and his taxidermy teacher John Edmonstone, a freed slave. The video combines animation, spoken word and text interspersed with microscopic topographies of varied shades of skin, digital renditions of skin from video games, and film footage of taxidermied bird life from Darwin’s collection at the Natural History Museum.

Copperfield will host a suite of works set in the Intersection, a space for the “unfinished conversation” around race, class and society, inspired by the lost plays of Frantz Fanon. For the first time these works will all be brought together in a single space, as part of a site-specific installation of detritus and monitors. The Finding Fanon Trilogy offers an inspection of race, class and its implications on the friendship of the artists, while the FF Gaiden works look at the wider implications of this discussion through testimony from groups at the sharp end of neoliberal policy, from army veterans now in the criminal justice system, to paperless migrants struggling to make a life in Europe.

 

Copperfield:
Exhibition opens 5 June, 6 – 9pm / Runs until 20 July

Seventeen:
Exhibition opens: 27 June, 6 – 9pm/ Runs until 3 August