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.
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