About

Marc Khafre’s work is driven by concealment, and its reversal. His materials are what the fashion industry produces in quantity and prefers not to disclose. Packaging ribbon, staff uniform ties, clothing care labels, all pulled out of circulation once they have served their brief purpose. Khafre does not depict this surplus. He creates directly with it, so that the finished work carries the industry's own evidence rather than a picture of it.

His first attempt to address that excess started as practical rather than artistic, a small collection of garments hand-made in natural fibers and conceptualized to be produced only against a confirmed order, a working alternative to overproduction. He set the project aside once he recognized a deeper underlying problem. Intention does not survive the act of being purchased. The work became his own only once it stopped needing to be sold.

Khafre draws his current material from years spent within the fashion retail industry, culminating at one of its major luxury houses, close enough to the end of the chain to see what brands dispose of and consider no one's concern. In FESTUNG, packaging ribbon bearing brand logos is hand-woven and stretched into a taut surface. Cut and joined without regard for the logos printed on them, the ribbons break each brand name off at a different, unrepeatable point, and the accumulated grid reads as pure abstraction until approached closely enough to recognize what has been severed. Khafre named the series after a chess term for a fortified position built to hold under pressure, a fitting analogy, to him, of an industry shielding its own debris from public knowledge. Yet the same surface that confronts the industry also pays close attention to what it squanders, to the weave of the fabric and the construction of a material otherwise overlooked. For Khafre, the two are not separate impulses. They are the same gesture, seen from two directions.

TIES turns that same attention toward a smaller, more personal material: uniform ties dismissed after each season. Khafre undoes them by hand and rejoins the pieces into a single surface, stretched across a frame. The seams where one tie meets the next, pulled tight under that tension, read like lines of visible strain, representing the vast volume of discarded material made to look uniform and complete, while at the same time revealing the so-called détail égoïste of the product to the viewer, a subtle motif usually meant only for the wearer of the tie to notice.

Marc Khafre was born in 1994 in Deux-Ponts, Germany. His most recent series, OBRONI WAWU, applies his method to clothing care labels retrieved from Kantamanto in Accra, one of the world's largest secondhand clothing markets, sewing and weaving them into surfaces that carry the weight of countless garments already declared worthless. The first two works from the series were included in the group exhibition The Land Remembers at GlogauAIR.