Larry Achiampong: When the Sky Falls, John Hansard Gallery, Southampton
Larry Achiampong’s most ambitious and personal show to date features new moving image, sound and sculptural installations. Transforming John Hansard Gallery into a purgatorial space based on childhood ruminations, Akan deities and unearthed histories, it also includes Sunday’s Best, a short film that considers how belief systems within the African diaspora are influenced by colonial histories. Also on show is PAN AFRICAN FLAG FOR THE RELIC TRAVELLERS’ ALLIANCE (MOTION), with its symbolic Pan African colour palette featuring 54 stars relating to each African country forming part of Achiampong’s expansive multi-disciplinary Relic Traveller project.
Until 21 March www.jhg.art
Cassi Namoda, Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London
Cassi Namoda’s first European solo exhibition features new paintings that explore ‘life and love in the city of Maputo’, the artist’s birthplace and home for several years. Each work is made up of images drawn from archival photographs, memories and imagination, weaving together personal experience and broader historical and fictional narratives. It is also partly inspired by the writings of the late Kenyan theologian John Mbiti, whose research challenged colonial interpretations of traditional African religions and the concept of dual rather than linear time as a way of exploring ‘alternative cadences of life’.
Until 7 March www.houldsworth.co.uk
There, where we promenade, Freelands Foundation, London
This group exhibition features works by Etel Adnan, Susan Aldworth, Rachel Kneebone and Leonor Serrano Rivas that explore unconscious dream states. Comprised of existing works alongside a newly realised installation by Rivas, the show explores how the inhabited body operates within the boundaries between conscious and subconscious states. Each of the four artists, linked by their literary, philosophical and cerebral investigations, call us to consider the ways in which we live outside ourselves before sleep brings us back.
Until 29 March www.freelandsfoundation.co.uk
Anne Ryan: Earthly Delights, Hastings Contemporary, Hastings
The first major UK exhibition by Irish artist Anne Ryan features a range of highly coloured, constructed paintings that focus on figures engaged in a variety of activities. Her subjects dance, party, and pose in various scenarios that draw from visual culture and the world around her. For this show she has created a new installation that occupies the whole of Hasting Contemporary’s main ground floor gallery space. Taking inspiration from Hieronymous Bosch’s Garden Of Earthly Delights, Ryan’s ‘pleasure garden’ features work assembled from throughout her career.
Until 29 March www.hastingscontemporary.org
Hardeep Pandhal: Confessions of a Thug: Pakiveli, Tramway, Glasgow
This multimedia exhibition takes its title from the 1839 pulp fiction novel Confessions of a Thug by the Orientalist writer Philip Meadows Taylor. In addition, its subtitle ‘Pakiveli’ refers to one of the artist’s rap monikers, adapted from an alias of the late rapper 2Pac, ‘Makiveli’. The show explores how heritage is constituted through performative and discursive practices, reflecting Pandhal’s ongoing exploration into the ways in which identities are subject to conflicting realities that shift over time and place.
Until 22 March www.tramway.org
Images:
1. Larry Achiampong, Sunday’s Best, 4K Colour Video (still) Installation View, The Logan Centre Chicago, 2016. Commissioned by Logan Centre Exhibitions Chicago © Larry Achiampong. Courtesy of the Artist and Copperfield London
2. Cassi Namoda, Little is Enough for Those with Love/Mimi Nakupenda, 2019, acrylic on canvas, 167.6 x 233.7 cm, 66 x 92 in
3. Leonor Serrrano Rivas, Estrella, 2018 © the artist and CA2M
4. Hardeep Pandhal | Confessions of a Thug: Pakiveli. Photography by Max Slaven
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