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Explore a world of heightened sensuality informed by Black queer club culture and Yoruba spirituality in the work of Nigerian British photographer Rotimi Fani-Kayode.
Beginning in the early 1980s, Fani-Kayode (1955–1989) developed a photographic practice that refused categorization, 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 the Biafra 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 subculture. Channeling 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 at the height of the AIDS epidemic.
Organized in partnership with Autograph ABP (London), Rotimi Fani-Kayode: Abiku (Born to Die) is the first North American survey of Fani-Kayode’s work and archives. The exhibition brings together key series of color 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.
IMAGE CAPTION Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Four Twins, 1985. Gelatin silver print, 9 x 13 7/8 in. Courtesy of Autograph ABP, London.
Born in Lagos, Nigeria, in 1955, Fani-Kayode emigrated with his family to London in the 1960s, escaping the Biafra War as political exiles. 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 the queer magazines Ten.8 and Square Peg. In 1988, he became a founding cosignatory of Autograph, an institution devoted to supporting Black photographers and photographic inquiries into race, rights, and representation.
Learn more about the artist.
Dr. Mark Sealy is Executive Director of Autograph ABP (London) and Professor of Photography, Rights and Representation at University of the Arts London. Author of two pathbreaking books published by Lawrence & Wishart Ltd, Photography: Race, Rights and Representation (2022) and Decolonising the Camera: Photography in Racial Time (2019), Sealy is interested in the relationship between art, photography, social change, identity politics, race, and human rights. He has written for many of the world’s leading photographic journals, produced numerous artist publications, curated exhibitions, and commissioned photographers and filmmakers worldwide.
Rotimi Fani-Kayode: Abiku (Born to Die) is organized by Autograph, London, and the Wexner Center for the Arts and curated by Autograph Director Dr. Mark Sealy with assistance from former Wexner Center Associate Curator of Exhibitions Daniel Marcus.
THIS PRESENTATION IS MADE POSSIBLE BY FotoFocus
EXHIBITIONS 2023–24 SEASON MADE POSSIBLE BY Bill and Sheila Lambert Carol and David Aronowitz Crane Family Foundation
FREE GALLERIES MADE POSSIBLE BY American Electric Power Foundation Mary and C. Robert Kidder Bill and Sheila Lambert
ADDITIONAL SUPPORT FOR FREE GALLERIES PROVIDED BY Adam Flatto CoverMyMeds PNC Foundation
WEXNER CENTER PROGRAMS MADE POSSIBLE BY Ohio Department of Development Greater Columbus Arts Council The Wexner Family Institute of Museum and Library Services Ohio Arts Council , with support from the National Endowment for the Arts CampusParc Ohio State’s Global Arts + Humanities Discovery Theme The Columbus Foundation Nationwide Foundation Vorys, Sater, Seymour, and Pease
ADDITIONAL SUPPORT PROVIDED BY Mike and Paige Crane Axium Packaging Nancy Kramer Ohio State Energy Partners Ohio History Fund/Ohio History Connection Larry and Donna James David Crane and Elizabeth Dang Bruce and Joy Soll Rebecca Perry Damsen and Ben Towle Jones Day Alex and Renée Shumate
Rotimi Fani-Kayode: Abiku (Born to Die)