Akeem Smith: One last Cry

One Last Cry is a new project by Akeem Smith: an exhibition presented after his residency at Lafayette Anticipations. Sculptor and video artist Akeem Smith (b. 1991 in Brooklyn) grew up in the Waterhouse neighbourhood of Kingston, Jamaica. His work seeks to erase the distinctions between art, fashion and anthropology, and to challenge the standards of Western cultural iconography.

He is interested in the economics of image production in its political, social and commercial forms, and the role of the artist as archivist. For the past 13 years, Akeem Smith has been collecting a growing archive of photographs and videos that document dancehall culture from the 1980s to the 2000s. His recent work celebrates this popular Jamaican movement, largely absent from institutional archives.