"I Am Recreating a Life I Never Lived" —Suraj Adekola

Suraj Adekola in his Manchester studio

In an exclusive interview with Udemma Chukwuma for Arts and Culture Place, Nigerian contemporary artist Suraj Adekola reflects on Adire, his creative process, his experiences living and working in Nigeria and the United Kingdom, and the legacy he hopes to leave for the next generation of African artists.

You work on Adire fabric instead of traditional canvas, which has become a defining part of your practice. What drew you to this textile, and what does it allow you to express about Black identity and culture?

What drew me to it as an artist was the realisation that Adire was never just cloth. It was economic currency, a sacred garment, and a living memory simultaneously. When I bring it into my studio in Manchester, a city built on the same colonial textile trade that extracted value from traditions like this one, something happens that no conventional canvas could produce.

I wanted to challenge the traditional use of oil or acrylic painting to tell the complex story of the British Empire and its connection to Africa. The material arrives already loaded with history, labour, and identity. My role is not to add meaning to it; my role is to continue a conversation that was already in progress before I was born.

I work with Adire because I wanted to take the work of women from my hometown further and continue the conversation started by my ancestors.

Adire is not a material I discovered; it is a material I grew up with. I specifically use Adire made in Abeokuta, my hometown in Ogun State. It is produced by Egba women whose resist-dyeing tradition has sustained households for generations. My mother wore it. As a child, I followed my father through Abeokuta, absorbing its presence long before I had the language to understand what it meant. 

Your series We Should All Be Blacks carries a powerful message about equality and our shared humanity. What do you hope people think about, or feel, when they encounter these works?

What I hoped people would think or feel then is what I still hope people experience when encountering my work today, a moment of genuine pause. Not comfort, necessarily. Not resolution. But the kind of stillness that arrives when something you have always sensed but never seen clearly is suddenly made visible on a surface in front of you.

I created We Should All Be Blacks because I wanted to challenge the marginalisation of other cultures, especially people of colour. The series emerged from a specific moment in my practice when I was asking urgent questions about visibility, value, and the cost of being seen in a world that assigns worth unequally.

The title was a provocation, an invitation to consider what our shared humanity actually requires of us, not simply as an aspiration but as a daily practice.

I don't want to tell people what to think. My work begins with a genuine question and ends with another one. The meaning of my work doesn't end with me. It is a window for imagination that begins with the viewer.

Football jerseys, military camouflage, and other cultural symbols appear throughout your paintings. What first inspired you to explore these visual references, and why are they important to your storytelling?

Each material I use is important because it references a specific story.

The sports jersey travels far from where it was made, accumulates enormous value, and is inseparable from the Black body that gives it meaning. Like Adire, it is traded, gifted, and can become sacred. Yet in both cases, the Egba woman who made the cloth and the athlete who wore the jersey, the body that gives the fabric its value is rarely the one that determines its worth.

The numbers on jerseys are not about specific players or teams. They are about numbering as a system, the reduction of identity to a unit that can be ranked, bought, and sold.

Camouflage introduces something different: militarisation, state power, and the politics of who is made visible and who is made to disappear. On a surface already carrying Adire and aged textile, camouflage asks what it costs a culture to survive within systems designed to control it.

These are not decorative choices. They are research questions expressed through material.

Your paintings are admired for their rich textures and layered surfaces. Could you take us inside your creative process, from selecting the Adire fabric to adding the final brushstroke?

Every piece begins on the floor. I lay the fabrics out and stand over them, looking, arranging, listening. Nothing is glued until the composition speaks to me. The floor is where the work thinks.

The Adire comes directly from Abeokuta. Alongside it, I work with textiles, I coffee-dye and artificially age by hand in my Manchester studio. The coffee is not a neutral material. Its scent carries my mother, her morning ritual, now gone, and carries me, a memory of when I newly arrived in a cold country, warming myself against unfamiliar weather. It also carries something older, the memory of school uniform stains, of cloth absorbing childhood before I understood what fabric could hold.

I distress the fabric, imagining it has been worn for fifty years before I was born. I am recreating a life I never lived so others can feel what I cannot remember. The ageing is not decoration. It is a way of travelling backwards through material, to feel the labour embedded in cloth, to feel the hands that touched it before mine.

The circle is my primary gesture, cut through aged fabric to reveal layers beneath. It arrived through listening rather than decision and has become the most distinctive mark in the series. On the earth fabric, it feels archaeological. On gold, it feels ceremonial. On archive, it asks questions I haven’t answered yet. All that I mentioned, Earth, Gold, Archive- are part of the isura (Treasure), the body of work I am currently working on.

When the work is finished, the surface tells me. Not dramatically, quietly. A stillness arrives that wasn’t there before. I stop wanting to add anything and start wanting to simply look. That is when it is done.

Having lived and worked in both Nigeria and the United Kingdom, how have these experiences influenced your artistic voice and the stories you choose to tell?

Living and working in both contexts means I carry that distance in my body every day. When I coffee-dye fabric in Manchester and place it beside Adire from Abeokuta, I am not making a statement about two cultures. I am making a surface that holds the truth of living between them, the grief, the cold, the warmth, the inheritance, the distance, the continuation.

Nigeria gave me the material, the Adire, the Egba women’s tradition, the indigo, the gold, the heritage that the work is rooted in. Manchester gave me the critical distance to see what that material carries that I could not see as a child. The tension between those two perspectives is where the work lives.

I didn’t choose this city accidentally. Sometimes the most political act is simply showing up in the right place with the right material.

What kind of legacy do you hope your work leaves, not only for collectors and audiences, but also for the next generation of African artists?

For collectors and audiences, I hope the work leaves something that cannot be unfelt. Not a lesson. Not a conclusion. A residue, the way music stays in the mind after the sound has stopped.

For the next generation of African artists, my hope is simpler and more specific: seeing a Nigerian artist living in Manchester, exhibiting internationally, selling serious work at high prices, and speaking about his practice with full confidence and no apology makes the possibility feel real. You do not have to translate yourself for the art world. You do not have to make your heritage smaller to fit the frame. The frame can be rebuilt from dire and coffee and the names the archive forgot.

That is the legacy I am working toward.

Away from the studio, what keeps you grounded? Are there aspects of growing up in Nigeria, or interests such as music, football, food, or travel, that continue to inspire your creativity?

Growing up in Nigeria gave me a relationship to colour, pattern, material, and community that I carry everywhere. The markets, the textiles spread on the ground, the way fabric moved through daily life as both the ordinary and the sacred, all of that lives in the work even when it isn’t named directly.

Music is always present in the studio. What I feel when I work is closer to what I feel listening to jazz music than what I feel looking at most paintings, something happening before understanding arrives, meaning and experience simultaneous. That is what I want the work to produce in the viewer. I try to stay close to that feeling while making.

Looking back at your journey, what advice would you give to your 20-year-old self as an emerging artist?

Have a clear standpoint. Know what you stand for and what you stand against. Have specific visual language to communicate. The visual language you are looking for is not somewhere out there waiting to be discovered. It is already in your hands. The work is learning to trust it completely, not partially, not apologetically, but with full commitment and full voice.

Be patient with the making and impatient with the excuses. Show up to the studio floor every day, whether or not you feel ready. The work teaches you what you need to know, but only if you are present for the lesson.

And one more thing, the moment will come at the right time. Not when you are ready in the way you imagine readiness. When the work is ready. Spend every day making the work more ready and less time asking when the moment will arrive.

It will arrive. Keep making.

Photos courtesy of Suraj Adekola