Award winning artist, Badru showcases: Clothes Our Parents Wore in Lagos

'Clothes Our Parents Wore' is therefore a meditation on memory, inheritance, and cultural continuity, expressed through the tactile language of aso - oke and thread…

These materials, rich with time and use, are not treated as passive remnants of the past but as active carriers of memory. Through processes of stitching, layering, and reconfiguration, the artist transforms aso - oke into vessels that hold stories of identity, social life, and generational transition. Each thread binds fragments of personal and collective experience, suggesting both repair and continuity.

The artist in a way also demonstrates that everything can be put to use, even clothes our parents have worn and seemingly disposed of or forgotten – literally preaching the gospel of recycling.

In Badru's words: “The central message of this exhibition is that everybody is moving towards reuse. Recycling. In this part of the world, we are not used to recycling; we waste things a lot. But if you go outside the country, they do a lot of reusing. Overseas, if you're going to buy something in the supermarket for instance, you go with your own polythene bag; if you open their fridges, you'd see that they reuse water bottles; quite unlike what we do here in Nigeria. Rather than throw away water bottles, they refill them with tap water and store them in their fridges. So the message is to tell us that there is beauty in ashes. These are all old clothes, but we can put them to beautiful use like you have seen at this exhibition.

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“The other message is to tell us that the Yoruba believe that clothes are not just to cover our nakedness; but to tell a story of Yoruba people; to tell a story/proverbs that has to do with clothes (aso); just to let us know that all over the world, particularly in Yoruba belief, clothes are not just to cover our nakedness, they are also spiritual.”

Explaining some of the concepts, Badru said: “Some of the titles that I explore in this exhibition have to do with Áso'. This one we are standing beside is titled 'Gogowu'. There is a proverb that says, 'Aso to ba kuniku la n pe ni gogowu', meaning: it is the cloth that you are left with after all said and done that is called gogowu. Gogowu can be translated to something that is important. Most of us have such clothes in our wardrobe that become so important, maybe because the tailor sewed it to perfection. There are several other proverbs, like 'Eniyan laso mi' meaning people are my covering. Here, Yoruba is not talking of cloth that we use to cover our nakedness; rather, they are likening human beings to clothes that cover nakedness. What that means is that even if you wear ten clothes, if you don't have people or a community of people supporting you, you still feel like you're naked.”

Other messages replicated with clothes at the exhibition include The Parable of the Ten Virgins in the Bible, with the artist accentuating the five who came with extra oil in their lamps.

Also notable is 'Oshodi, a unique work that captures the rowdiness of the old Oshodi in Lagos, which the artist said captured his shock the very first day he set foot in Oshodi from his base in Abeokuta.