Rotimi Fani-Kayode
About the Artist
Rotimi 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, where his father was a politician and chieftain of Ife, the ancestral Yoruba capital. At age 11, Kayode and his family fled to Brighton, England to escape the Nigerian Civil War. He is also the founder of Autograph a nonprofit organization that helps black and minority photographers build their careers. Fani-Kayode created much of his work during the height of the AIDS crisis in response to the homophobia he witnessed in England under Margaret Thatcher and in his home country of Nigeria. Using the black body as his primary subject, Fani-Kayode explored themes of black queerness and cultural identity in a political call to action. His photographs combine African and European iconography 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 employ eroticism and moments of intimacy or communion to present queer sexuality as an act of healing and survival.About the Work
Untitled and In Gods We Trust are part of a series of works Rotimi Fani-Kayode created during the 1980s. These works offer an intimate encounter with his subjects, primarily black men, whose postures and interactions play with the hidden and the visible. Fani-Kayode’s works are often sexually explicit – or, more specifically, homosexually explicit – in order to challenge the queer black man’s exclusion from representation. He states: “I make my pictures homosexual on purpose. Black men from the Third World have not previously revealed either to their own peoples or to the West a certain shocking fact: they can desire each other.” In contrast to the fetishizing representation of the black body in the West or “victim” images in the media, Fani-Kayode believed that it was the time for “us to re-appropriate such images and transform them ritualistically into images of our own creation.”“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 the feeling of having very little to lose. It produces a sense of freedom from the hegemony of convention… It opens up areas of creative enquiry which might otherwise have remained forbidden. At the same time, traces of the former values remain, making it possible to take new readings on to them from an unusual vantage point. The results are bound to be disorientating.”
These works also illustrate Fani-Kayode's interest in the ways that photography (a traditionally Western medium) and African traditional art might intersect. He describes how the African mask is not created to represent a material reality, but rather to allude to a spiritual reality through human and animal forms in what Yoruba priests and artists call a “technique of ecstasy.” By photographing subjects in ambiguous positions and forms, Fani-Kayode hoped to capture a similar imaginative interpretation of reality.
“My reality is not the same as that which is often presented to us in Western photographs. As an African working in a Western medium, I try to bring out the spiritual dimension in my pictures so that concept of reality become ambiguous and are opened to reinterpretation…Both aesthetically and ethically, I seek to translate my rage and my desire into new images which will undermine conventional perceptions and which may reveal hidden worlds.”
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