Rotimi Fani-Kayode

Nigerian-British, 1955 - 1989

BiographyRotimi Fani-Kayode was a photographer who used his art to capture the black queer experience, to reject homophobia, and to fight for equal political representation during the AIDS crisis. Fani-Kayode was born in 1955 in Lagos, Nigeria. His father was a politician and chieftan of Ife, the ancestral Yoruba capital. At age 11, Kayode and his family moved to Brighton, England to flee the Nigerian Civil War. He later attended Georgetown University and earned an MFA in 1983 from the Pratt Institute. He began his career in photography after moving back to England and founded the organization “Autograph: Association of Black Photographers.” This nonprofit helps black and minority photographers build careers and advocates for them in the mainstream.

Much of his early work was created during the height of the AIDS crisis and responded to the homophobia in Thatcherite England and his home country of Nigeria. His photos expressed black queerness, focused on cultural identity, and acted as political calls to action. His photographs combine African and European iconography as a way to contest the marginal status of Yoruba culture and explore the position of the black body in Western society. In some images, Fani-Kayode incorporates elements of Yoruba spirituality into ironic signifiers of African “otherness” in a way that rejects the Primitivist themes of European modernism. Other images make reference to explicit eroticism and moments of intimacy or communion to present queer sexuality as an act of healing and survival.

Fani-Kayode has had solo shows at Riverside Studios, London (1986); Harvard University’s Hutchins Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts (2009); Rivington Place, London (2011); Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town (2014); Tiwani Contemporary, London (2014); Syracuse University Art Galleries, New York (2016); and Hales Project Room, New York (2018). His work has been included in group exhibitions at numerous venues, including South West Arts, Bristol (1985); Oval House Theatre, London (1987); and Camerawork, London (1989). It also was featured in the African Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2003) and at ARS 11 (2011) at Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki. In December 1989, at the age of 34, Fani-Kayode died from complications due to AIDS.

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