AKEEM SMITH

Born 1991 in New York, USA.
Lives and works in New York, USA.

Akeem Smith is a New York based multimedia artist working in sculpture and video. He was born in Brooklyn, NY in 1991, and raised in the Waterhouse district of Kingston, Jamaica. Throughout his career, Smith has flattened the distinctions between conceptual art, fashion, and anthropology, in a pursuit to push up against the ideals of western cultural iconography. At the core of his practice is an interest in the economy of image production - in its political, social and commercial forms - and the role of the artist as archivist, intervening in the circulation of knowledge and cultural preservation.

AS PART OF THE LOUIS ROEDERER DISCOVERY AWARD
PRESENTED BY
HEIDI, BERLIN, GERMANY

AKEEM SMITH

ALTARPIECE

What stories do we have the right to tell? Who has the power to tell them? These two questions inhabit Akeem Smith's photo-sculptures. As a homage to the dancehall scene of Kingston, Jamaica, where he grew up, Smith transformed vestiges from his childhood into relics and complemented them with found and donated photographs. His work draws as much from collective memory as from the artist’s recollections, shedding light on the role of women within this nocturnal life, a space and time he considers as empowering. Smith appropriates a visual culture that emerged in the late 1970s, after Jamaica’s independence and the formation of an indigenous national identity, to sacralize an Afro-Caribbean aesthetic and prompt us to reflect on the place of our cultures in the construction of our views.