Akeem Smith’s Work Is “A Lens to Decode the Things That Don’t Make Sense”

Akeem Smith’s new works, presented by Heidi at Art Basel Miami Beach, appear like weathered relics. Rusted metal frames, contorted gates, and fragments of walls are conjoined, holding within them flickering images of faces. The photographs and VHS stills feel as though they’re surfacing through the material itself, tugging the eye toward excavated stories. Raised between Brooklyn and Kingston, Jamaica, the New York–based artist and founder of fashion label Section 8 has built a practice that oscillates between clothing, film, and sculpture, all rooted in cultural memory. For years, Smith has been building an archive, gathering images entrusted to him by family, friends, and key figures from the world of Caribbean dancehall. Less about nostalgia, for Smith this is a living resource, one shaped by trust, intimacy, and the politics of who gets to preserve a history. To learn more about Smith’s work, Something Curated’s Keshav Anand speaks with the artist.

Keshav Anand: This new series for Art Basel brings together images and structures that both carry the marks of time. What was the moment, or the instinct, that made you decide these two things – your archive and these architectural remnants – belonged in conversation with each other?

Akeem Smith: I’m currently working on a new video piece. The seeding moment for the sculptures was discovering these two stills in the source footage. When I pulled them out, I saw a new frame for them in those remnants.

KA: How did you go about selecting the architectural materials to work with – the corroded metal, broken gates, fragments of walls?

AS: I have a new shipment of materials coming from Jamaica to my studio in Philadelphia soon, so I picked some items almost blindly. Really I just needed to make a little space. I see each piece as an artefact, but I’m trying not to be precious or emotionally connected to each individual bit. I chose pieces that look like they could have come from the same structure, but they actually didn’t. I focused on colour and patina as determining factors in selecting each piece.

KA: You’ve grown up moving between Brooklyn and Waterhouse in Kingston. I wonder if you could elaborate on how these two geographies live inside your practice today? Do they show up as tension, harmony, nostalgia – perhaps all of the above?

AS: Over the past two years, I’ve been learning more about cartography. Some of the knowledge I’ve gained I think subconsciously has had an effect on my practice and finished works. Physical geography and memory have seemed like baggage at this particular moment. This may be a phase, but my goal has been to work more as a cartographer of visual aesthetics.

KA: Your practice has been described as collapsing fashion, art, anthropology, and nightlife. But I’m curious how you see it: is it all one continuous practice to you, or do you see distinctions?

AS: I do combine a lot of disciplines in my work in fashion and in art, so I understand the description. But importantly, my work in those areas stays separate, too. I think my fashion and art practice(s) are in parallel with one another and I do my best not to have them cross-pollinate.

KA: Your work deals with the “economy of the image” – how pictures circulate socially and commercially, who controls them, who benefits from them. How has your thinking around image economies changed as the prevalence of everyone documenting themselves has increased?

AS: I don’t think my own understanding of image economies has changed with this trend, but it has had some effect on how other people think about the image-based material I’ve collected in my practice. How I think of those artefacts has always been on a broader timescale and that’s reflected in how I use them.

KA: You’ve said that a lot of your work is for “a distant future”, for people decades or even centuries from now. When you imagine someone from the future encountering these pieces, what do you hope they feel or understand about the communities and histories you’re drawing from?

AS: What I’m hoping for is that my work allows them to understand themselves better. What I mean by that is to use the work as a lens to decode the things that seem like they don’t make sense within themselves or their environment.

KA: What are you currently reading?

AS: The Prison Letters of George Jackson.

KA: And what’s playing in your studio these days?

AS: I’ve been replaying a lot of readings with my psychic that I recorded over the past 12 years. She passed away last April.



Feature image: Akeem Smith, Social Cohesiveness, Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement, Centre d’Art Contemporain, Genève, 2021. Photographer: Cynthia Mai Ammann © Akeem Smith. Courtesy of the artist, Centre d’Art C ontemporain, Genève, and Heidi, Berlin