Jeremy Hutchison: Dead White Man: Effigies
Pi Artworks is delighted to present a solo exhibition by UK artist Jeremy Hutchison. Encompassing video, sculpture, collage, photography and performance, Dead White Man: Effigies explores the global trade in secondhand clothes.
Pi Artworks is delighted to announce a solo exhibition by UK artist Jeremy Hutchison. Consisting of video, sculpture and live performance, this show presents a new chapter in Hutchison’s expansive work, Dead White Man.
This ongoing body of work deals with the global trade in secondhand clothes. Every year, twenty-four billion garments are donated to charity: the majority are shipped to the African continent. Most are sold in street markets, but forty percent are dumped on mountains of landfill. In Ghana, they are known as ‘obroni wawu’, Dead White Men’s Clothes.
In each chapter of this ongoing work, Hutchison performs the Dead White Man. Mobilising his own subject position - a white Western male - he becomes the embodiment of this troubling industry. Wearing sculptures made from secondhand clothes sourced in West Africa, he becomes a spectre of waste colonialism. In these monstrous incarnations, his flesh remains visible: a white hand, leg or foot. In simple terms, he performs his own whiteness.
For this new development in the work, the artist will divide the gallery in two:
The main space will feature an installation of effigies. This consists of dozens of figurines assembled from secondhand textiles; each one a miniature icon of the Dead White Man. Presented in a kind of wrongheaded museological display, these objects reference the ritual use of anthropomorphic totems, whose curative function operates through performance. Fashioned from clothes primarily sourced in the street markets of West Africa, this installation resurrects that material - returning it to the consumer delirium of London’s West End.
This ethic of resurrection continues throughout the exhibition. In the second room of the gallery, a projected video sees the Dead White Man reverse the secondhand supply chain. Rising from a Senegalese street market, he wanders the city of Dakar until he arrives at the international port. Shipped back to the United Kingdom, he then haunts the shopping malls, textile recycling plants and corporate HQs of fast fashion brands. In the process, Hutchison performs his own entanglement with the network of processes that sustain the secondhand clothing industry. In doing so, he contests its claims to charity and sustainability, presenting it instead as a form of zombie imperialism.
Dead White Man has been in development since 2017. It began with Hutchison’s invitation to attend an artist residency at Raw Material Company - a contemporary art platform in Dakar, Senegal. Throughout the subsequent years, he returned to Dakar to produce video and photographic work, while developing an extensive collaboration with The Or Foundation, a Ghanaian activist group based in Kantamanto (the largest secondhand market in the world).
Pi Artworks is delighted to announce a solo exhibition by UK artist Jeremy Hutchison. Consisting of video, sculpture and live performance, this show presents a new chapter in Hutchison’s expansive work, Dead White Man.
This ongoing body of work deals with the global trade in secondhand clothes. Every year, twenty-four billion garments are donated to charity: the majority are shipped to the African continent. Most are sold in street markets, but forty percent are dumped on mountains of landfill. In Ghana, they are known as ‘obroni wawu’, Dead White Men’s Clothes.
In each chapter of this ongoing work, Hutchison performs the Dead White Man. Mobilising his own subject position - a white Western male - he becomes the embodiment of this troubling industry. Wearing sculptures made from secondhand clothes sourced in West Africa, he becomes a spectre of waste colonialism. In these monstrous incarnations, his flesh remains visible: a white hand, leg or foot. In simple terms, he performs his own whiteness.
For this new development in the work, the artist will divide the gallery in two:
The main space will feature an installation of effigies. This consists of dozens of figurines assembled from secondhand textiles; each one a miniature icon of the Dead White Man. Presented in a kind of wrongheaded museological display, these objects reference the ritual use of anthropomorphic totems, whose curative function operates through performance. Fashioned from clothes primarily sourced in the street markets of West Africa, this installation resurrects that material - returning it to the consumer delirium of London’s West End.
This ethic of resurrection continues throughout the exhibition. In the second room of the gallery, a projected video sees the Dead White Man reverse the secondhand supply chain. Rising from a Senegalese street market, he wanders the city of Dakar until he arrives at the international port. Shipped back to the United Kingdom, he then haunts the shopping malls, textile recycling plants and corporate HQs of fast fashion brands. In the process, Hutchison performs his own entanglement with the network of processes that sustain the secondhand clothing industry. In doing so, he contests its claims to charity and sustainability, presenting it instead as a form of zombie imperialism.
Context:
Dead White Man has been in development since 2017. It began with Hutchison’s invitation to attend an artist residency at Raw Material Company - a contemporary art platform in Dakar, Senegal. Throughout the subsequent years, he returned to Dakar to produce video and photographic work, while developing an extensive collaboration with The Or Foundation, a Ghanaian activist group based in Kantamanto (the largest secondhand market in the world).
The first chapter of this work was exhibited towards the end of 2023 at the British Textile Biennial. This included sculpture, performance, video, installation, billboards and workshops. The work has received global media attention, featuring in The Guardian, Dazed, The Times, The Daily Telegraph, KingKong, Creative Review, Vogue Business, among others.
Jeremy Hutchison is a British artist based in London. Working across performance, sculpture, text and video he intervenes in systems of production and consumption, perverting norms to produce crisis and absurdity. Much of his work intervenes in consumer culture, subverting the mechanisms that sustain it: the language, media and labour practices. This results in a kind of radical nonsense, plunged into the smooth logic of capitalism. In a context of planetary catastrophe, he is committed to the potential of art to intervene; to challenge dominant structures and propose alternatives to an absurd status quo.
Exhibitions include the ICA, Modern Art Oxford, Fondazione Prada, EVA Biennale, Z33, Casino Luxembourg, Kunstverein Wiesbaden, Lisson Gallery, Victoria & Albert Museum, Jerwood Space, Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof, Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington, British Textile Biennial, Budapest Design Biennale, Qalandiya Biennale, Korean Cultural Centre and Southbank Centre. Residencies include Delfina Foundation, Raw Material Company, Arts Catalyst, SOMA and Hospitalfield.
https://jeremyhutchison.com / https://www.instagram.com/jeremyhutchison/