Red Bull Arts New York 220 West 18th Street New York
NY 10011 United States
“Akeem Smith: No Gyal Can Test” presents an installation of new works centered upon the artist’s extensive dancehall archive
About this Event
Red Bull Arts is pleased to present Akeem Smith: No Gyal Can Test, the first major solo show by artist Akeem Smith.
Please note the below regulations will be enforced:
There are a limited number of tickets for online purchase
Walk-ins are welcome, even if the online tickets are marked as -sold out
Reservations are encouraged, but not required
Masks are required for entry
You are allowed to reserve entry for you +1
Last entry is 7:30PM
We look forward to welcoming you into the gallery. If your desired time slot is full, please walk-in at your leisure and we will accommodate your group.
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Akeem Smith: No Gyal Can Test
As his first solo presentation-cum-retrospective, Akeem Smith debuts an installation of new sculptures and video centered upon his extensive archive accumulated over the last decade as a monument to the promise and legacy of dancehall. Smith’s solo presentation traverses the slippages between memory, the archive, and history, excavating the personal photographs and videos entrusted to Smith over the past decade by various family members, friends, and pivotal figures of the dancehall community.
Drawing upon his experience growing up between New York and Jamaica, No Gyal Can Test forms a layered exploration of spectral coloniality, diaspora, and the voyeurism that results from transposing these artefacts across cultural, economic, and temporal divides. Reuniting these lineages–previously overdubbed, printed as doubles, and circulated across diasporic currents–for the first time, Smith’s photographs and video coalesce as poetic reconstitutions of a lost world. Framed by the architectural remnants of structures literally demolished and moved from his childhood neighborhood, Kingston’s Waterhouse District, the women of the dancehall are deified in multi-channel video installations and monumental reliquaries housing assemblages of historical garments, jewelry, and documentation, as the larger-than-life figures remembered from his adolescence.
The hybridity of Smith’s artistic practice is a throughline across his work as an artist, designer, stylist, and creative director—a career that repeatedly conjures the type of women who raised him, a woman who moves without pause between different worlds. As an insider and outsider, Smith can uniquely navigate the gap between Jamaican culture and the artworld, the aspirations of dancehall and the realities of its legacy, a private world made public through its circulation, and the often conflicting roles of the documented and the documentarian.
As part of the exhibition, Smith has collaborated with sculptor Jessi Reaves to create custom mannequins, the British fashion designer Grace Wales Bonner to design Red Bull Arts gallery attendant uniforms, and musicians Total Freedom, Physical Therapy, Alex Somers, and dancehall deejay Bounty Killer with historian Carolyn Cooper, to create original scores.
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Safety Precautions & Regulations
Red Bull Arts has instituted health and safety measures in accordance with guidance from national, state, and local government and health authorities. These measure include, but are not limited to:
Hand sanitizer will be available upon entering the space, with additional stations found throughout
All staff and attendees will be required to wear a facial covering at all times. Failure to wear a face covering will result in removal from the exhibition
Single-use surgical masks will be available upon entry for anyone arriving without their own mask, or in need of a replacement
Social distancing rules (6 feet distance between individuals) will be enforced throughout the space (with exceptions made for guests visiting the exhibition from the same household)
No eating or drinking allowed in the space
The path throughout the exhibition will be marked and guide visitors in one single direction through the exhibition hall. All attendees should follow the marked path.
You can learn more about these practices here. Please note that advance appointments are encouraged, but not required. We will do our best to accommodate walk-ups based on capacity.