The Architecture of Labour
Online Exhibition | 1 December 2026 – 28 February 2027
Art of the Motherland is pleased to present The Architecture of Labour, a five-work painting series by Ghanaian artist Edem Agbenafa (b. 1992). Created in 2026, the series explores the people, movement and physical intelligence that sustain some of West Africa’s most significant commercial environments.
Across five 50 × 50-inch acrylic paintings, Agbenafa takes viewers into markets in Ghana, Senegal, Nigeria and Benin: Makola Market in Accra, Kejetia Market in Kumasi, Marché HLM in Dakar, Onitsha Main Market in Nigeria and Dantokpa Market in Cotonou. Rather than treating these places simply as architectural or commercial spaces, he presents them as living structures created through human labour.
At the centre of the series are the workers themselves. Women carrying goods, artisans and cobblers, tailors operating sewing machines, trolley pushers transporting merchandise, and women navigating canoes laden with produce become the principal subjects of the paintings. Each work focuses on a different dimension of labour: endurance, craftsmanship, production, movement and navigation.
The series proposes a broader understanding of architecture. For Agbenafa, the infrastructure of commerce is not only found in buildings, roads and physical structures, but also in bodies, movement, memory, skill, coordination and repeated acts of labour. The physical actions that enable markets to function become, in his paintings, architectural forms in their own right.
Visually, Agbenafa transforms recognisable working environments through painterly gesture, repetition, compressed space and colour. Strong receding lines draw the viewer into crowded marketplaces, while repeated figures create rhythms that echo the movement and repetition of work. A predominantly cool palette of blues, whites and darker tones is punctuated by vivid reds, oranges, yellows and greens drawn from clothing, commodities, textiles and commercial life.
There is also a deliberate tension between the monumental and the everyday. Tasks that might ordinarily appear routine are enlarged into monumental compositions: bodies become architectural forms, repeated gestures become patterns, and marketplaces become stages of human movement. Through this shift in scale and attention, the series invites us to reconsider forms of labour that are essential to everyday life yet are rarely given sustained visual contemplation.
The Architecture of Labour ultimately offers a visual journey across West Africa while resisting the idea that work and commerce have a single, universal experience. The five markets become distinct settings through which Agbenafa examines the knowledge, physical effort and human agency embedded within everyday economic life.
As Agbenafa explains:
“In West Africa, the real structure is the human body in motion.”
Through this series, the artist presents market workers not as peripheral figures within an economic system, but as “the active architects of our daily lives.”
The Architecture of Labour will be available to view online through Art of the Motherland from 1 December 2026 to 28 February 2027.
