Our fellow Abdulrazaq Awofeso is a part of a group exhibition New Aberdeen Bestiary at the Aberdeen Art Gallery in Scotland.



The 50th anniversary of Peacock – a workshop for art, Aberdeen’s renowned print studio, is being marked with an exhibition of the New Aberdeen Bestiary at Aberdeen Art Gallery.

The exhibition is the culmination of a three-year collaborative project involving Peacock printmakers and seven international artists from a variety of cultural and artistic backgrounds, from performance art to textiles. The artists are Abdulrazaq Awofeso, Delaine Le Bas, Joy Charpentier, Carla Felipe, Julio Jara, Sadie Main and Pedro G Romero.

Seven international artists from a variety of cultural and artistic backgrounds, from performance art to textiles, each chose an animal, real or imagined, and explored its symbolic, social and cultural significance. In close collaboration with Peacock printmakers, they realised a print, or series of prints, centred around each animal. Over the course of the project, each artist developed a body of work that will be exhibited at Peacock’s gallery space The Worm. Each exhibition offered an occasion for writers to engage with the works on show and develop a text-based response to the visual work. The prints forming the New Aberdeen Bestiary are now exhibited as a complete series for the first time at the Aberdeen Art Gallery in 2024, to mark Peacock’s 50th birthday.

Bestiaries are a form of illuminated manuscript popular in northern Europe throughout the Middle Ages. Derived from classical texts about the natural world and early Christian works, a bestiary is a compendium of animals, paired with moralising or allegorical explanations.

The New Aberdeen Bestiary has been inspired by the 12th-century illuminated manuscript known as the Aberdeen Bestiary. It arrived in Aberdeen during the 17th century when it entered the library collection at Marischal College. It is now in the collections of the University of Aberdeen. Prompted by the amount of marginalia in the medieval text, the notes, comments and corrections, sketches and doodles, the New Aberdeen Bestiary looks at the liminal spaces between categories, where categories shift and morph into one another; the blurry areas between animal and beast.

The exhibition is curated by Nuno Sacramento, Director of Peacock & the worm.

Work by artist Abdulrazaq Awofeso, exploring memories and stories, both personal and universal, revolving around the figure of the cock and the keeping of chicken.

Now living and working in Birmingham, UK, Abdulrazaq Awofeso spent his early years in Lagos, Nigeria. Fruit of a strict upbringing according to the tenets of Islam, for most of his childhood and youth Awofeso was woken up daily by the crowing of the cock, which became inextricably associated with early morning prayers. The animal features in all three main religions practiced by the Yoruba people in Nigeria: Christianity, Islam, and traditional Yoruba religion. In Christianity, the cock is associated to the episode of the denial of Saint Peter: it often appears in representations of the story and comes to be a symbol of warning, divine grace and repentance. In Islam, a hadith reported by the Prophet Abu Hurairah indicates that the time for morning prayer is when the cock crows, for the animal can see angels, a sign of goodness favourable for prayer. In the Yoruba religion, it is one of the animals ritually sacrificed to Ogun, a primordial spirit and one of the central deities of the religion.

Photo: Two of the exhibiting artists, Abdulrazaq Awofeso and Sadie Main, pictured at the Art Gallery with exhibition curator Nuno Sacramento, Director of Peacock & the worm

8 June 2024 – 5 January 2025, Aberdeen Art Gallery (Gallery 16), admission free.
For visiting information go here

More information about the New Aberdeen Bestiary here
About the work of Abdulrazaq Awofeso here