ART
How artist Larr y Achiampong is recasting iconic videogame characters
For the past 20 years, Frieze London has been one of the world’s most prestigious contemporary art fairs. Not somewhere you might expect to find videogames as a subject, then. But as an artist and committed player himself, Larry Achiampong incorporates the medium into his latest exhibition. Not just in the works – a series of portraits featuring reimaginings of iconic game characters – but in the space itself, which has been set up like a gaming room. “I wanted to make sure that it was interactive,” he explains, “so there’s actual games that you can play, and having those as references to the work as well.”
The small, square space of an art-fair booth feels almost perfect for Achiampong’s recreation of the council flats where he grew up. It’s a kind of physical autobiography, inviting visitors into a space with armchairs and two-seater sofas, classic consoles hooked up to CRTs. Piles of old music CDs provide a further glimpse into the tastes that shape his work. You might suggest this installation of sorts is superfluous to the portraits hanging on the walls, which are ultimately what is being sold, but for Achiampong it’s an intentionally leftfield move, to “push the boundaries of what an art fair isn’t and what an art fair could be.”
Depicting John Marston as Black addresses the misrepresentation of cowboys in fiction
Such an approach has been integral to his past works too (see ‘Portrait of an artist’), although with more oblique connections to games. Here, however, they’re front and centre. The subjects of his portraits include Duke Nukem, Master Chief and F-Zero’s Captain Falcon – or rather, reimagined versions of them. Instead of John-117 inside the suit, for example, we find Nana, a pink-haired Black woman. Street Fighter’s Shoryuken master, meanwhile, is presented as ‘Black Ken’ – a direct reference to Achiampong’s childhood when, playing on a monochrome TV, he believed the palette-swapped version of the character also changed the colour of his skin.
The aim is to highlight the lack of diverse characters, and counter the negative stereotypes that dog Black characters. “It’s about being able to dream, in a space that allows dreaming,” he says, “but then dealing with the irony that a lot of the characters are usually white men.” Artists reimagining pop-cultural characters isn’t new, but Achiampong’s portraits tackle these questions in different ways. Depicting Red Dead Redemption’s John Marston as Black, for example, addresses the misrepresentation of cowboys in fiction, given that historically one in four cowboys wasn’t white. Yaa, Guardian Of The Tomb, is a deliberate antithesis to Lara Croft, a protector rather than looter of cultural artefacts.
Achiampong’s chosen subjects include characters whose faces are hidden unde
