Larry Achiampong
Sonsbeek 2026
Park Sonsbeek, Arnhem, City Center Arnhem and Museum Bronbeek, Arnhem
Inleiding
Choice is always a luxury for those who've never seen the bottom, 2026
A Letter (Side B), 2026
Transposing the concept behind a 2021 work in Liverpool to the city of Arnhem, Achiampong resignifies two existing local monuments. For this commission, Achiampong temporarily wraps each monument in a Pan-African flag he has designed. The artist layers the figures with perspectives and narratives often excluded from Western public memory, moving away from the power, citizenship, and colonial legacy that these monuments triangulate.
By wrapping two monuments in a Pan-African flag of his own design, Larry Achiampong invites us to consider how civic memory is enriched when public monuments become places where multiple histories and perspectives can coexist. The work opens a space for dialogue about whose stories are made visible in the public realm, which figures are immortalized as statues, and how public monuments can hold more than one narrative at once.
Over de kunstenaar
Larry Achiampong (b. 1984, London) is a British-born, Ghanaian artist who lives and works between Essex and London. His projects employ film, still imagery, aural and visual archives, live performance, objects, sound, and game design to engage with ideas surrounding class, gender, cross-cultural, and digital identity. With works that examine his communal and personal heritage—in particular, the intersection between popular culture and the residues of colonization—Achiampong crate-digs the vaults of history. These investigations examine constructions of “the self” through splicing the audible and visual materials of personal and interpersonal archives, offering multiple perspectives that reveal deeply entrenched inequalities. In 2025, Tate Publishing released Achiampong’s debut monograph If It Don’t Exist, Build It. He has had recent solo exhibitions at venues including Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston, UK, 2024; a touring exhibition in the UK at Turner Contemporary in Margate, MK Gallery in Milton Keynes, and BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, 2022–23; and PHI, Montreal, 2021. His work has also been commissioned by Art on the Underground, London, 2022; Liverpool Biennial, 2021; and The Line, London, 2020. Achiampong received the Stanley Picker Fellowship in 2020 and the Paul Hamlyn Award in 2019.
Commissioned by Sonsbeek 2026
Presented in collaboration with Museum Bronbeek
All works courtesy of the artist and Copperfield, London