About

Bio

Suraj Adekola (b. 1983, Lagos) is a Nigerian-born contemporary artist based in Manchester, working across painting, textile, drawing and installation. His practice is rooted in Abeokuta, Ogun State, a major historical centre of Yoruba Adire production, and his work considers how materials carry memory, identity, and value across time and place.

 

Suraj transforms Adire sourced from Abeokuta alongside textiles altered in his Manchester studio through processes of dyeing, staining, ageing, cutting and reconstruction into contemporary art. These processes allow inherited materials to become sites of transformation, where personal memory intersects with histories of migration, identity, belonging, labour and cultural exchange.

 

His series We Should All Be Blacks marked an important stage in this investigation. Through the fragmentation and reassembly of Adire, Adekola explored belonging, identity and the experience of reconstructing oneself across cultural and geographical distance. This concern with what is inherited, displaced and reconstructed develops further in his ongoing series Ìṣura / Treasure. 

It evokes the immediate, pre-analytical resonance of a Miles Davis recording or a Lao Tzu verse, where the meaning and the experience are simultaneous.

 

At the center of Ìṣura, Suraj expands his attention to the question of value: what makes something precious, what we choose to preserve, and how objects, memories, traditions, and relationships become treasure. The series moves between the personal, cultural, and economic, considering the ways value is assigned to materials, bodies, labour and cultural inheritance.

 

The relationship between Abeokuta and Manchester provides an important context for this enquiry. Abeokuta is a place from which Adire carries a history of Yoruba knowledge, making and cultural memory; Manchester is a city whose own history is deeply connected to the global movement of cotton, textiles, labour and capital. Between these two places, Suraj considers the movement of cloth, people, labour and value, and the ways cultural materials acquire new meanings when they travel.

 

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, textile, and memory converge. The transformation of an intimate experience into a physical object reflects a central question of the series: when does something become treasure?

 

Suraj's work does not seek simply to illustrate history. Instead, it allows materials to carry and transform history. Cloth becomes a record; fragmentation becomes a form of memory; stitching becomes reconstruction; and painting becomes a way of negotiating what is inherited, lost, preserved, and valued.

 

Suraj continues to develop a practice in which material, identity, memory, and value remain in constant conversation.

 

Adekola has exhibited in London, Manchester, Geneva, Beirut, and Nigeria, and has participated in auctions including Bonhams, Piasa, and Genève Enchères. He holds an MA in Contemporary Fine Arts from the University of Salford, Manchester (2021) 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