Artist Spotlight Talk: Larry Achiampong

Larry Achiampong 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.

At Sonsbeek 2026 he is presenting three works at different locations. Transposing the concept behind a 2021 work in Liverpool to the city of Arnhem, Achiampong resignifies two existing local monuments: the Lorentz monument (1931) in Park Sonsbeek and the Burgers (Citizens) (1983) sculpture at the police station in Arnhem’s city centre. 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.

At Museum Bronbeek, Achiampong’s film A Letter Side B (2023) looks at the affective impact of history, immigration and geographical separation on two brothers living in Britain and Ghana. The film collapses time, exploring how the past interrupts the present, incorporating recent footage filmed by Achiampong in Ghana alongside archival footage from The Museum of African Art: The Veda and Dr Zdravko Pečar Collection in Belgrade, Serbia. Through current and older technologies, visuals, sound and recollections, the film points to the social and political consequences of institutional structures that threaten migrants and refugee families.

On Sunday 11 October Achiampong will contextualise these works in the broader framework of his practice and artist vision. The presentation includes the screening of Relic 0, the prelude to the Relic Traveller film series, that moves between African and Western vistas and focuses on specific architectures of colonialism as delivered by an anonymous narrator.

Achiampong is joined by Pauljac Verhoeven, the director of Museum Bronbeek, who will tell more about his work and the activities of Bronbeek as a combined museum and house for veterans.

Photo: A Letter (Side B) (Een brief (De achterzijde)), 2023. Courtesy of the artist.