High Street Fashion (2018)

(Pencil on paper 48”x 44.5”)

A drawing of the collapsed garment factory, Rana Plaza, in Bangladesh (2013), in which over 1,000 employees were killed making this the worst garment factory disaster in history. The unregulated factory produced commodities for Western clothing brands such as Gucci, Primark, Benetton, Walmart and Prada. The West’s outsourcing of cheap labour contributes to the latest iteration of colonial trade. Not only garments, but labour, and even life itself, are considered dispensable and cheap. Controversy still circulates about the status of compensation and culpability for this tragedy. The drawing explores all material: building structure, human subjects, machines, and rubble, as elements on a plane of equivalence, attempting to critique dehumanising theories in which all matter is invested with an equivalent agency, and all humans an equal culpability in global systems. Such theories undermine the global north’s responsibility as the architects of such events. The drawing attempts to capture the scale of the disaster and the omnipotent position of the photographer and artist as they reproduce the spectacle of the West’s greed and disregard.