Ed Cross Fine Art Gallery at 19 Garrett Street, London, is home to — Akube Remix — a solo show of new works 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 way 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 what is 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 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.

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 at 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. He was resident in South Africa for 14 years, but now lives and works between Birmingham, UK, and Lagos, Nigeria. His artwork can be found in various private and institutional collections.

Untitled, Akube Remix series 2024 Pallet wood coat hangar 112x60x2cm (Photos: Rocio Chacon)

Abdulrazaq Awofeso: Akube Remix 31 October- December 20 Ed Cross 19 Garrett Street, London EC1Y OTY

Stonewash 1 Akube Remix series 2024 pallet wood and coat hanger 72x39x6cm Rocio Chacon

Stonewash 11, Akube Remix series 2024 pallet wood and coat hanger 70x41x7cm (Rocio Chacon)

 Stonewash 1 Akube Remix series 2024 pallet wood and coat hanger 72x39x6cm

 Clothes rail installation Akube Remix series 2024 pallet wood and coat hanger 145x116x62cm Rocio Chacon

Untitled, Akube Remix series 2024 pallet wood 79x10x50cmRocia Chacon

Untitled, Akube Remix series 2024 pallet wood and coat hanger 125x5x2cm

Akube Remix series 2024 pallet wood & coat hanger 129.5×72.5 x2cm

Artist Abdulrazaq Awofeso