Ed Cross is delighted to present Akube Remix, a solo show of new work by Abdulrazaq Awofeso.
Developing a series first presented at 1-54 New York earlier this year and opening simultaneously with a commissioned installation, part of MAC Birmingham’s Waste age: What can design do? exhibition, Awofeso’s latest Okrika pieces depict items of second-hand clothing shipped from the West to Africa. The works are rendered in his characteristic repurposed wooden pallets and peppered with new details: brand names and sartorial flourishes, all drawing attention to the contrast between the sculptures’ rough materiality and the supposed refinement of the objects they represent.
By using repurposed materials to invoke luxury symbols, Awofeso calls into question the relationship between identity, consumption and environmental degradation. Inviting viewers to consider what they themselves consume and discard, Akube Remix challenges the ways in which identities – both personal and cultural – are commodified through globalised fashion.
Awofeso’s wooden garments embody the tension between the transient allure of branded clothing and the permanence of environmental waste, but they also poke fun at classist fears about counterfeit items. Alongside the stylish lapels and jaunty pockets adorning his sculptures, intricately carved logos of major fashion houses and designers dare a fashion-world darling to clutch their pearls, thereby conceding that the artist’s iteration of a Chanel handbag contains enough of the original to be worth worrying about.
In both scale and sensibility, the pieces in Akube Remix are abundantly human, bursting with humour as well as pertinent questions about representation, satire and homage. Is a brand just a logo? What does it mean to put one we all recognise on a surface we’re used to seeing in the backroom of a warehouse? Does changing the material of something change its meaning too?
Presented with audio of traders recorded at Tejuosho market in Lagos, the immersive exhibition reflects the works’ playful profundity. Set up like a stall or shop, with ‘folded’ items displayed on tables and others suspended from metal coat hangers on clothing rails, Akube Remix pushes Okrika’s core concept to its logical conclusion. Offered up in-situ, the parallels and discrepancies between whatis being represented and how, are writ large; the artist’s tongue is firmly in his cheek all the while.
After all, the majority of clothes dumped in the global south every year are fabricated with far less integrity than Awofeso’s sculptures of them. Made from the very materials that shipped our clothes round the world in the first place, Awofeso’s Okrika exemplifies the idea of medium as message. In his hands, the pallets for shipping clothes become the clothes themselves; what, then, of their consumers?
Confronted by items we consider near-disposable, suddenly monumentally solid and back like a bad-dream boomerang from whatever landfill we subconsciously (and physically) consigned them to, Akube Remix’s investigation of global supply chains insists that we consider our own place in them. The objects that comprise the series might be clothing, but by bringing the market stalls where they are sold again back to the consumers who sent them there, Awofeso leaves no doubt as to the true subjects of his investigation: me, us. You.
The themes behind Akube Remix extend to Awofeso’s commissioned installation for MAC Birmingham's Waste Age: What can design do?, further deepening the artist's exploration of global consumption, waste, and identity. Both exhibitions highlight the contradictions between luxury and waste, emphasising the cyclical journey and imagined future of second-hand clothing as it moves from the West to Africa and back again. By continuing his practice of using discarded materials to create his garments, Awofeso creates a poignant dialogue between the aesthetics of excess and the environmental realities they conceal, one which the audience will be able to see on full display in the upcoming MAC Birmingham exhibition, on view from October 26, 2024 - February 23, 2025.
Born in Lagos in 1978, Abdulrazaq Awofeso is a graduate of Yaba College of Technology, Nigeria. Awofeso was resident in South Africa for 14 years but now lives and works between Birmingham, UK, and Lagos, Nigeria.
Awofeso's artwork can be found in various private and institutional collections, including the British Government Art Collection, Benetton Imago Mundi, Laurent Perrier, Femi Akinsanya, Deborah Goldman and Yemi Odusanya. Solo exhibitions include Out of Frame, Ikon Gallery (Birmingham, 2022) and Broad Streets, Ed Cross (London, 2023). Last year, his work Avalanche of Calm was exhibited as part of South London Gallery's seminal group exhibition Lagos, Peckham, Repeat and this year he was commissioned by MAC Birmingham to create an installation forming part of their Waste Age: What can design do? exhibition, 2024-5.
