Dead White Man: Effigies

25 Apr-8 Jun 2024

PV 25 Apr 2024, 6-8pm

Jeremy Hutchison, Effigy, 2024. Credit: Courtesy of the artist

Overview

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). 

Artists

Press

Dead White Man: Effigies press release
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