David Blandy & Larry Achiampong led PRAKSIS's inaugural residency, "New Technology And The Post-Human," in March - April, 2016. Through their work, Blandy and Achiampong examine ideas of communal and personal heritage, using performance to investigate cultural hierarchies and the “fiction of the self”.
Blandy and Achiampong have exhibited extensively in the UK and internationally, both individually and as a duo, at venues including Tate, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai; and MOMA PS1, New York. Their 2014-15 hip-hop-inspired collaboration Biters was funded by the Arts Council of England and is “unique, in that it unifies both appropriation as a methodology and “biting” [the stealing of taggers’ or hip-hop artists’ personal styles] as an existential state”, critic Morgan Quaintance has written. “Biters…is a project about attraction and repulsion, and in hip-hop Achiampong and Blandy have recognised a musical genre pulsating with all the contradictory energies of hierarchical value systems, based on race, privilege and subjection”.
Video: David Blandy and Larry Achiampong, Finding Fanon 2, 2015
Commissioned by Brighton Digital Festival 2015, supported by Arts Council England. Finding Fanon 2 is made using the Grand Theft Auto 5 in-game video editor. The Finding Fanon series is inspired by the lost plays of Frantz Fanon, (1925-1961) a politically radical humanist whose practice dealt with the psychopathology of colonisation and the social and cultural consequences of decolonisation.
