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
Through film, still imagery, archives, performance, objects, sound, and game design, Larry Achiampong engages with issues related to gender and digital identity through his own Ghanaian background, as well as his wider communal heritage. The artist’s work exposes constructions of the self, and how class, race, infrastructure, and colonial legacies inform lived experience.
Transposing the concept behind a 2021 work in Liverpool to the city of Arnhem, Achiampong resignifies two existing local monuments: Burgers (Citizens) (1983) by Joop van Lunteren, which depicts a family in front of a police station, evoking the subtle presence of state authority and the Lorentz Monument (1931) designed by architect Willem Dudok and sculptor Gijs Jacobs van den Hof in commemoration of physicist Hendrik Antoon Lorentz. For Sonsbeek 2008, artist Hans van Houwelingen added the names of other scientists to the Lorentz monument as a gesture toward global collective knowledge. 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. Museum Bronbeek, the Netherlands’s national center for understanding the colonial-military past, is also a home for veterans from the Dutch armed forces and former Royal Netherlands East Indies Army. Achiampong’s flags bring a counter-symbol of Black solidarity and self-determination into dialogue with an institution steeped in Dutch imperial rule. In activating markers of civic identity, the artist reveals how power is embedded within Arnhem, and how monuments stabilize some narratives while silencing others.
Listen in the audiotour
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