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Akeem Smith’s First Solo Exhibition Explores 90s Dancehall Through Personal History | Red Bull Arts
Women at a bashment in Waterhouse, Kingston. Image from the OUCH Archive, bequeathed to Akeem Smith. Chromogenic print, date and photographer unknown. Courtesy of Akeem Smith and Red Bull Arts.Courtesy of Akeem Smith and Red Bull Arts. ![Women at a bashment in Waterhouse, Kingston. Image from the OUCH Archive, bequeathed to Akeem Smith. Chromogenic print, date and photographer unknown. Courtesy of Akeem Smith and Red Bull Arts.Courtesy of Akeem Smith and Red Bull Arts.](https://assets-global.website-files.com/62ee0bbe0c783a903ecc0ddb/6472bc374ce71b9f39d54e61_FlauntMagazineRedBullArts.jpeg) Women at a bashment in Waterhouse, Kingston. Image from the OUCH Archive, bequeathed to Akeem Smith. Chromogenic print, date and photographer unknown. Courtesy of Akeem Smith and Red Bull Arts. Courtesy of Akeem Smith and Red Bull Arts. Red Bull Arts, who brought us last year’s eerily prescient Gretchen Bender [retrospective](https://www.flaunt.com/content/gretchen-bender-retrospective?rq=gretchen%20bender), has announced a unified national program between their venues in New York and Detroit. [Akeem Smith: No Gyal Can Test](https://redbullarts.com/newyork/news/akeem-smith-no-gyal-can-test/) will debut at Red Bull Arts New York from April 10 – May 31 before traveling to Red Bull Arts Detroit in October. “With our first traveling exhibition and a residency program open to artists and curators across the country, we are developing a unified program that can thrive on a national scale,” said Max Wolf, Red Bull Arts Chief Curator. “Akeem is a rare artistic talent —part old school punk, part poet— who has long been at the center of a generation of vanguard artists, fashion designers and musicians who have radically altered our creative collective consciousness over the years.” In No Gyal Can Test, artist, stylist and creative director Akeem Smith excavates the slippages between memory, archive, and history as he revisits his formative years in the midst of the rapidly-globalizing dancehall scene in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Stills from Akeem Smith, Untitled, 2020. Multi-channel video installation with sound. Courtesy of Akeem Smith and Red Bull Arts. ![Stills from Akeem Smith, Untitled, 2020. Multi-channel video installation with sound. Courtesy of Akeem Smith and Red Bull Arts.](https://assets-global.website-files.com/62ee0bbe0c783a903ecc0ddb/6472bc374ce71b9f39d54e5d_image-asset.jpeg) Stills from Akeem Smith, Untitled, 2020. Multi-channel video installation with sound. Courtesy of Akeem Smith and Red Bull Arts. This will be Smith’s first major solo presentation, but his name may be familiar for those who recognize him as a key figure in fashion’s underground who was instrumental in shaping the visual identity of Hood by Air, and has since lent his talents to Yeezy and Helmut Lang. The transgressive sensibility that propelled Smith’s rise was shaped by his upbringing in Kingston’s Waterhouse district, where he was raised by members of the OUCH Collective, a six-woman crew that was a fixture of the ‘90s dancehall scene. The crew was centered around the Ouch store, a custom clothing boutique that designed many of the most iconic looks of the period for members of the community. No Gyal Can Test will lend a close eye to the impact of these women’s creations on dancehall culture and Smith’s career as an artist. The exhibition’s centerpiece will be a series of large-scale sculptures, constructed from salvaged architectural remnants and fragments that Smith sourced from his childhood neighborhood over the last year. These structures will house a series of multi-channel video installations that Smith edited from his extensive archive of photographs and VHS tapes.