Building a parliament with old train seats in an art gallery

[John Ashworth]

Building a parliament with old train seats in an art gallery

Dozens of worn plastic train seats and dilapidated wooden lockers that were destined for the dump in Ghana have ended up in a Manchester art gallery, in a work by one of Africa's most exciting young artists.

When hundreds of hard, scratched second-class train seats were abandoned after their clapped-out carriages were scrapped several years ago, only one man was likely to be interested in them...

After salvaging the seats, the artist has repurposed 120 of them - plus several dozen old lockers once used by train workers - to create a four-sided imitation of Ghana's parliament chamber at the Whitworth gallery in Manchester. It's called Parliament of Ghosts...