What I am Reading Now…
Larry Achiampong

June 2026

 
 

Larry Achiampong (b. 1984, London) is a British-born, Ghanaian artist who lives and works in Essex. 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 colonisation, 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.

Reading
 

Concerning Violence
Frantz Fanon (Penguin Great Ideas, 2008)

Close The App, Make The Ting:
Transformative Prompts for the Modern Artist
Elijah (Velocity Press, 2025)


Playing

Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound
The Game Kitchen (DotEmu, Joystick, 2025)


Watching

40 Acres
Dir., Randall Thorne (Mongrel Media, 2024)


Listening

Silent Alarm
Bloc Party (V2 records, 2005)


Works by the artist

Wayfinder
Dir., Larry Achiampong (Turner Contemporary with Baltic, 2022)

If It Don’t Exist, Build It
Larry Achiampong (Tate Publishing, 2025)

Please note the views published in What I am Reading Now… are personal reflections of the contributors.
These may not necessarily represent the views of the University of Dundee.

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