One of Elephant’s artist’s top of the last decade, Larry Achiampong, has a major new exhibition of familiar and new works this week, at John Hansard Gallery, Southampton. It includes this film work, Sunday’s Best, featuring the artist’s mother. In newly commissioned work, Attack of the Henrys, unnamed guides will take visitors through an underworld of invisible workers in the gallery—a space that resembles a kind of administrative purgatory. So far, so sci fi. Once there, anthropomorphized vacuum cleaners will play the role of security guards, protecting a sculpture made of discarded materials. It’s an exciting new direction for Achiampong who has worked with performance, music, film and installation and who won the Paul Hamlyn Award at the end of 2019.
