About

Bio

Suraj Adekola (b. 1983, Lagos) is a Nigerian artist based in Manchester, working across painting, textile, drawing and installation. His connection to Abeokuta, Ogun State, a historic centre of Yoruba culture and Adire production, informs his choice of materials. Through cloth, he considers what people carry from one place to another: family recollections, ways of making, and ideas about what deserves to be kept. He asks what happens to inherited materials, to our sense of who we are, and to our experiences when they move between cultures and economies.

Suraj works with Adire sourced from Abeokuta. Traditionally produced using indigo and resist-dyeing techniques, Adire is closely associated with Yoruba dress and textile-making in southwestern Nigeria. He combines it with textiles dyed and altered in his Manchester studio through processes of staining, ageing, cutting, and reconstruction. These processes change the cloth’s colour, surface and structure. He connects his cutting and reassembly to the breaking up and rearranging of forms in Cubist painting: separating parts and bringing them together in new relationships. Working with cloth already patterned by other makers also brings their decisions into contact with his own. He continues to develop a practice in which material, identity, migration, memory, belonging, labour, cultural exchange, and value remain in constant conversation. His work becomes a way of negotiating what is inherited, lost, preserved, valued, and what can be made from what remains.

The cloth’s patterns, stains, cuts, distressed areas and edges remain visible in his work. Suraj uses these existing marks and later changes to consider what is inherited, lost, preserved and made anew. His series We Should All Be Blacks marked an important stage in this approach. Cutting and reassembling Adire became a way to think about how people adjust when they enter another culture: what they retain, what changes, and how they piece together a life away from familiar surroundings. These questions continue in his ongoing series Ìṣura / Treasure.

In Ìṣura, Suraj expands his attention to the question of value: What makes something precious? Why do we keep certain objects? How does a piece of cloth become inseparable from a person or an occasion? What distinguishes financial worth from the importance something holds for its owner? The series brings these questions to materials, the body, the work of making, and knowledge passed between generations. Running through them is a question he keeps returning to: who has the authority to decide what is valuable?

Abeokuta and Manchester give these questions a particular setting. The Adire he sources from Abeokuta connects his work to Yoruba dyeing practices and the people who sustain them. Manchester’s history connects it to cotton production, textile manufacturing and international trade. Working between these places draws his attention to who makes cloth, how it travels, what it is worth, and what meanings it acquires when it arrives elsewhere. 

Within Ìṣura, ordinary experiences can become profound repositories of memory. In Treasure of Mama's Tea, for example, the memory of his late mother and the everyday ritual of sharing tea become the starting point for a work in which coffee-stained textile and Adire bring the traces of an everyday substance into the painting. The work asks how an ordinary encounter can become something we hold onto long after the moment has passed.

Adekola has exhibited in London, Manchester, Geneva, Beirut, and Nigeria, and his work has appeared in auctions at Bonhams, Piasa, and Genève Enchères. He holds an MA in Contemporary Fine Arts from the University of Salford, Manchester (2022) and a Higher National Diploma in Painting from Auchi Polytechnic, Nigeria (2007).

CV

Awards and Recognition

University of Salford Graduate Award Scholarship  2022

Awards and Recognition

1. Suraj Adekola (b. 1983, Lagos, Nigeria) is a Manchester-based contemporary artist working between painting, textile, and immersive installation.

2.  

19+

Years Active

800+

Works Cretaed

20+

Exhibitions

6+

Countries