Audio Composition, 2020
Breath of Asase Yaa was created to accompany moving image, and sculptural works that brought together childhood ruminations, Akan deities and speculative future histories.
Unnamed narrators from Achiampong’s most recent film, The Expulsion, guided visitors through a subterranea of ‘invisible’ workers, invoking an east London bruised from the effects of the national recession of the early 1990s. For When the Sky Falls, part of John Hansard Gallery was transformed into a purgatorial space based on nondescript, yet deeply familiar office spaces, iconic to the West African diaspora as representing the bittersweet sting of surviving forced migration.
In the installation Attack of the Henrys, sphinx-like anthropomorphised vacuum cleaners create a formation of nightmarish guards with rictus smiles, seemingly in thrall of the gentle undulations of this sound work Breath of Asase Yaa (the Ashanti divine mother).
Breath of Asase Yaa, produced with funding from the John Hansard Gallery