The Showroom | Larry Amponsah & Andrew Hart present a sonorous performance "Led in Strange Ways"

Artists Larry Amponsah & Andrew Hart present Led in Strange Ways, a performance with music improvisation, public interaction, and conversation. A new take on Jazz and Afro beats is brought further to life with Hart's drum machine, conceptual fashion designs by Ten Motiwa, and a screening of recent video works.

Larry Amponsah & Andrew Hart met at the Royal College of Art, where they recently completed their MA Painting in 2018 and 2019, respectively.

Larry Amponsah is a multi-media artist whose practice investigates traditional modes of image-making whilst employing unconventional strategies of production to look at the contemporary politics of imagery. Traditionally trained as a painter, creates collages made of archival images, objects, and stories from various cultures in order to negotiate systems of power and create new ways of transcending boundaries.

Andrew Hart is a multi-disciplinary artist who focuses on the symbiotic relationship between sound and painting through ongoing rhythmic research and play of improvised and spontaneous generative processes. His mutating practice questions the myriad formalities and dialogues around painting and issues including identity, pictorial space, subjective experience, context and his obsession with the circle.

Ten Motiwa is a conceptual fashion menswear designer who specialises in fur and sustainability. He grew up between London and Essex and references a sense of belonging within their grime and drill subcultures. Motiwa uses fashion to awaken convocations about how most youths today feel about life – from politics, economics, and culture.

Image: Larry Amponsah, Looking for Sugar in the Ocean… Who is the Enemy? film still 10, 2018. 15 mins. Courtesy of the artist's studio

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.