Rotimi Fani-Kayode: Tranquility Of Communion

"On three counts I am an outsider: in matters of sexuality; in terms of geographical and cultural dislocation; and in the sense of not having become the sort of respectably married professional my parents might have hoped for....Such a position gives me a feeling of having very little to lose." - Rotimi Fani-Kayode

Beginning in the early 1980s, Rotimi Fani-Kayode (1955-1989) developed a photographic practice that refused categorisation, cutting across cultural codes, gender norms, and artistic traditions. Born into a prominent Nigerian family, Fani-Kayode emigrated to London in the 1960s, seeking political refuge during civil war. As an art student in the United States, he came to negotiate his outsider status along multiple axes, balancing his family heritage and immigration status alongside his own queer sexuality and exposure to underground subcultures. Channelling these multiple facets of his identity into photography, Fani-Kayode generated a remarkable body of images over the course of a career cut tragically short by his death in 1989.

Organized by Autograph (London) and the Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus), Rotimi Fani-Kayode: Tranquility of Communion is the first North American survey of Fani-Kayode's work and archives. This major exhibition brings together key series of colour and black-and white photographs, along with archival prints and never-before-exhibited works from Fani-Kayode's student years. Often created in collaboration with his partner Alex Hirst (1951-1992), Fani-Kayode's photographs treat romantic love with spiritual reverence, translating the emotional intensity of same-sex, multiracial desire into richly evocative symbolic language. Today, his art remains a potent source of inspiration, presciently anticipating contemporary photographic approaches to identity, sexuality, and race.

Rotimi Fani-Kayode (b. 1955, Lagos, Nigeria; d. 1989, London, United Kingdom) produced genre-defying photographs that speak to his experience as a gay African man living in England in the 1980s. He emigrated with his family to London in the 1960s, escaping civil war as a political exile. He relocated to the United States in 1976 to pursue undergraduate art studies at Georgetown University and continued his studies at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute. Returning to London in 1983, Fani-Kayode became an active participant in the Black British art scene, exhibiting at London’s Brixton Art Gallery, among other community-oriented spaces, and publishing his photography in magazines such as Ten.8 and Square Peg. In 1988, he became chair of Autograph (London), a visual-arts charity devoted to supporting photographic inquiries into race, rights, and representation

Guided Tours take place every Saturday at 1:30pm

Events

May 1: To Catch The Sprit Of The Old Rites

May 15: Embodied Generations: Drawing + Movement Workshop with Odera Igbokwe

May 22: If Beauty Is The Mother Of Pathology, What Is Desire?

Learn More

Exhibition Audio Guide

Traces of Ecstasy - an essay by Rotimi Fani-Kayode

Globe and Mail: Black photographer leaned on Yoruba symbols for erotic images

New York Times: Two Photographers with an Eye for the Spiritual Meet in an Ohio Museum (Paywalled)

i-D: Rotimi Fani-Kayode’s Galactic Post-Punk Energy Is Eternal

Frieze: Rotimi Fani-Kayode Is a Pillar in Photographic History