The Showroom | Artist Amartey Golding screens his "Chainmail" series with a live conversation

Artist Amartey Golding screens his three Chainmail films , in a conversation and Q&A with dancer Solomon Golding & Curator Katherine Finerty

Amartey Golding’s practice is centred around a sincere demand to be self-implicating. He views his work, from process to experience to outcome, as a portal through which to be honest and multi-dimensional. This entails holding oneself and the communities they identify with to account, and allowing oneself to be self-critical whilst refusing labels: to act and be represented how you want to be. To achieve this Golding creates work that simultaneously brings people together and creates new rituals: fictional subcultures that become reality.

We witness this ideological method most strongly in the artist’s Chainmail film series exploring the human condition through the experiences of black British men. These groups gather to activate Golding's decadent and heavy chainmail in rich environments that transform from fantasy into reality before our eyes. And finally, given the lived experiences of creating these works – from individual performers testing their physical endurance under the weight of these handmade sculptures, to surrounding participants forging a new community and sense of mutual respect – there are always real-life consequences.

Golding started creating this series, funded by the Arts Council, in 2016 after two of his godson’s friends were violently murdered in quick succession. Upon reflecting on the cultures imposed on him and his peers, he sought to challenge the idea that stereotypes are timeless and instead embraced the idea that they are not only constructed, but up for being dismantled and superseded by self-implicating representations of what people need and who they want to be. We first enter this realm in Chainmail I, where the artist’s brother Solomon (the first black British male dancer to join the Royal Ballet Company) encounters a group of men and activates the chainmail – an item that both preserves life and facilitates death, renders you at once as ‘aggressor’ and ‘victim’, sets you free yet leads to imprisonment.

Image: Amartey Golding, Chainmail 1 still, 2016, Courtesy of the artist

Amartey Golding is a multimedia artist preferring to work with mediums that he is untrained in, the last 3 years seeing Amartey incorporate fashion, Chainmail, Film, and Ballet in to his practice. Often looking at how contradictory ideas coexist within the individual and ideological conflict, Amartey's work is usually self implicating, exploring our individual inability to avoid blame or apology. Born to a Ghanaian father and Scottish mother in 1988, Amartey was raised in London, Cambridge and Ghana by his mother and Jamaican stepfather as a Rastafarian. He started focusing fully on his art at 17 whilst living in the YMCA in Cambridge before completing a Foundation Art degree at Central St Martins. Amartey continued at CSM, completing part of an architecture degree before leaving and moving to Dubai to be the first artist invited on the 18 month residency at Tashkeel residency program. Since being back in Britain, he has had multiple exhibitions in Denmark, Germany and the UK.

Soloman Golding is a dancer from North London who grew up in Jamaica and Ghana. Solomon became the first Black-British born dancer to join the The Royal Ballet, and danced with The San Francisco Ballet from 2017-19. In 2019 Solomon founded House of Solomon, an art curation, creative direction and production company. House of Solomon is a space dedicated to accommodating artists from the spectrum of artistic practices to collaborate, create and experiment to create works of exceptional quality and content.

This programme takes place within Theaster Gates's installation Black Image Corporation presented by Prada, The Vinyl Factory, and The Showroom. Collective Intimacy is inspired by Gates’s ethos of collaboration and The Showroom’s commitment to togetherness and communal knowledge, taking on multiple trans-located narratives of the current Black experience as a point of departure for a cosmopolitan worldview. In response to Gates’s reactivated spaces in Chicago and how his socially engaged projects enable communities to connect and grow, Collective Intimacy aims to create a new space for people to gather, listen, converse, and contemplate amongst a fusion of art, design, music, and everyday life.

Black Image Corporation presents distinct spaces creating a myriad of possibilities for collective engagements, featuring an installation of Gates’s art objects, furnishings, and new films that capture the methodologies of urban renewal and community activation founding his practice. Pieces from Chicago imbued with powerful histories, uses, and localities resonate with distinctive lounge design from here in London – like a love letter between two cities, under the roof of a new House. Taking place at both 180 The Strand and The Showroom, Collective Intimacy hosts interdisciplinary interventions by artists, musicians, designers, writers, thinkers, collectives and members of the public, who are all invited to distort notions of selfhood and togetherness in the spirit of creating a global community.