A Glittering City: Ayo Akingbade & Duchamp & Sons

Whitechapel Gallery, 19 May – 15 August 2021

“The magic of the glittering city had confused her” Cyprian Ekwensi, Glittering City, Lokotown and Other Stories (1966)

Concrete tower blocks, glossy high rises, red buses and trains in transit weave the social landscape of everyday London living. Speaking to architects, public sector workers and young people, artist and filmmaker Ayo Akingbade (b.1994) creates moving image work that forges conversations on urbanism, gentrification, power and resilience.

Over six months, Akingbade collaborated with Whitechapel Gallery’s youth collective Duchamp & Sons to explore ideas of place and belonging. Through workshops, screenings and fieldwork in the local area, they traced memories of displacement and discussed the meaning of home and community, interrogating present challenges and future aspirations.

Echoing the uncertain times we live in, the new commission Fire In My Belly (2021) offers a compelling portrait of London through the voices of young people as they navigate an uncharted road map of the city. At Highgate Cemetery, paying homage to the black feminist and activist Claudia Jones (1915-1964), they consider how overlooked migrant legacies can be preserved. The architect Farouk Agoro layers their stories with personal insights of living in Brixton and designing the Rail Road Bridge mural, a gateway feature for Brixton Street Market.

Presented alongside is Dear Babylon (2019), a dystopian film essay that follows three art students and their investigations on the future of social housing when the announcement of the AC30 Housing bill threatens to push working class tenants out of the capital. Compelled to act, the students contemplate a number of options: to start a riot, to make a film, or to stage a protest at No. 10 Downing Street. Centering filmmaking as a constructive mode of resistance, they interview local residents, the architect Elsie Owusu, curator Meneesha Kellay, and layer archival footage of Berthold Lubetkin, the pioneering Modernist architect who designed their estate to record its communal history.

A Glittering City invites us to contemplate how we experience a city that is in constant flux. It echoes the precarity of the moment and considers how the uncertainty of tomorrow plays a key role in the shared feelings we have about home.

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Images: Andy Keate