Rotimi Fani-Kayode (20 April 1955 – 21 December 1989), born Oluwarotimi Adebiyi Wahab Fani-Kayode,"Rotimi Fani-Kayode (In Memoriam)" , Autograph Newsletter, No. 9, December 1989/January 1990. was a Nigerian photographer who at the age of 11 moved with his family to England, fleeing from the Biafran War. A seminal figure in British contemporary art, Fani-Kayode explored the tensions created by sexuality, race and culture through stylised portraits and compositions. From 1982-1989, he created the bulk of his work leading up to his death of AIDS related complications.
Early life and education Rotimi Fani-Kayode was born in Lagos, Nigeria, on 20 April 1955.Rotimi Fani-Kayode - Nominee, 1955 - 1989. Note: Hirst's death is listed as 1994, albeit other sources cite 1992. The Legacy Project. His father, Chief Babaremilekun Adetokunboh Fani-Kayode (1921–1995), was a politician and chieftain of Ifẹ, an ancestral Yoruba city. His mother was Chief (Mrs.) Adia Adunni Fani-Kayode (nee Sa'id) (1931–2001).Rotimi Fani-Kayode. The Guggenheim Museums and Foundation. Rotimi had four siblings, including Femi Fani-Kayode, his younger brother.Biography: Chief Femi Fani-Kayode
The Fani-Kayode family moved to Brighton, England, in 1966, after the military coup and the ensuing civil war in Nigeria. Rotimi went to a number of British private schools for his secondary education, including Brighton College, Seabright College, and Millfield, and then moved to the United States in 1976.
He earned his BA degree in Fine Arts and Economics from Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., in 1980,Kelly, Julia (March 3, 2022). "Georgetown University Art Galleries Feature New Exhibitions". Georgetown University. and his MFA degree in Fine Arts and Photography at the Pratt Institute in 1983. While studying at Pratt, Fani-Kayode became friendly with Robert Mapplethorpe, who he claimed had an influence on his work.Conversation with the author, 1988.
Work After graduating from Pratt, Fani-Kayode returned to the UK, where he became a member of the Brixton Artists Collective, exhibiting initially in some of the group shows held at the Brixton Art Gallery before going on to show at other exhibition spaces in London. Fani-Kayode's work explored Baroque themes, sexuality, racism, colonialism and the tensions and conflicts between his homosexuality and his Yoruba upbringing.Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Photographers. His relationship with the Yoruba religion began with his parents. Fani-Kayode stated that his parents were devotees of Ifa, the oracle orisha, and keepers of Yoruba shrines, an early experience that may have informed his work. With this legacy, he set out on the quest to fuse desire, ritual, and the black male body. His religious experiences encouraged him to emulate the Yoruba technique of possession, through which Yoruba priests communicate with the gods and experience ecstasy. An example of such relations between Fani-Kayode's photographs and the Yoruba "technique of ecstasy" is displayed in his work "Bronze Head" (1987). His goal was to communicate with the audience's unconscious mind and to combine Yoruba and Western ideals (specifically Christianity), fusing aesthetic and religious eroticism.Worton, Michael. "Behold the (sick) man". National Healths: Gender, Sexuality, and Health in Cross-cultural Context (2004): 151–165.
Describing his art as "Black, African, homosexual photography", Fani-Kayode and many others considered him to be an outsider and a depiction of diaspora. He believed that due to this depiction of himself, it helped shape his work as a photographer. In interviews, he spoke on his experience of being an outsider in terms of the African diaspora. His exile from Nigeria at an early age affected his sense of wholeness. He experienced feeling as if he had "very little to lose". However, his identity was then shaped from his sense of otherness, and it was celebrated. In his work, Fani-Kayode's subjects are specifically black men, but he almost always asserts himself as the black man in most of his work, which can be interpreted as a performative and visual representation of his personal history. Using the body as the centralized point in his photography, he was able to explore the relationship between erotic fantasy and his ancestral spiritual values. His complex experience of dislocation, fragmentation, rejection, and separation all shaped his work.
Yoruba Influences In "Sonponnoi" (1987), there is a headless black figure, decorated in white and black spots, holding three burning candles on his groin. Sonponnoi is one of the most powerful orishas in the Yoruba pantheon; he is the god of smallpox. Fani-Kayode adorned the figure with spots to represent a Sonponnoi's smallpox and Yoruba tribal marks. The triple-burning candle on his groin evokes the sense that sexuality continues even in sickness/otherness. It also represents how the Christian faith replaced the Yoruba tradition while also bringing disease with it during colonialism.
Fani-Kayode frequently referenced Esu, the messenger and crossroads deity who is often characterised with an erect penis, in his work. Fani-Kayode would engrave an erect penis in many of his images to describe his own fluid experience with sexuality. His ''Black Male, White Male'' intersects his racial and sexual themes with subtle displays of a devotee-deity relationship. Speaking on Esu, he insists: "Eshu presides here [...] He is the Trickster, the Lord of the Crossroads (mediator between the genders), sometimes changing the signposts to lead us astray [...] It is perhaps through that rebirth will occur." Esu also appears in Fani-Kayode's photography, Nothing to Lose IX. The presence of Esu is understood in the colouring of the mask; using white, red, and black stripes the mask stands as a representation of the deity Esu. Although these colours symbolise Esu, the mask itself has no precedence in traditional African mask-making; this subtle theme is almost flattening the mask to represent an overarching "African-ness" (a critique of the notion of "primitiveness" that was widely digested by a European audience).
Fani-Kayode's posthumous project, "Communion" (1995), reflects his complex relationship with the Yoruba religion, a "tranquility of communion with the spiritual world". One of the images in the series, "The Golden Phallus", is of a man with a bird-like mask looking at the viewer, with his penis suspended on a piece of string. The image has been described as an ironic representation of how black masculinity has been burdened by the Western world. In this image ("The Golden Phallus"), as in Fani-Kayode's Bronze Head, there is a focus on liminality, spirituality, political power, and cultural history—taking ideals seen as "ancient" (in the display of "classical" African art) and re-introducing them as a contemporary archetype.
Fani-Kayode's "Bronze Head" (1987) shows a cropped figure's black body that reveals his legs and butt as he is about to sit on top of a bronze Ife sculpture. The Ife sculpture is placed on a round platter, stool, or pedestal, and is placed strategically at the centre of the picture frame. Typically, the bronze head in the photograph is meant to honour the Ife king. However, in the context of Fani-Kayode's photograph, it satirizes the Yoruba kingship institution. The photograph represents both his exile and homosexuality, two core parts of his world.
Surrealism Fani-Kayode's photography is representative of non-western surrealism. His surrealist work takes influence from his Yoruba background and artist like Eikoh Hosoe. He does this through the fragmented representation of the Black male body as it relates to power, desire, and sexuality. Fani-Kayode's work was largely displayed in intimate publications and gallery spaces. His work was primarily for the Queer community and later gained a global audience.
Notable Works
Adebiyi Every Moment Counts II Collection at the Tate
Death Fani-Kayode died at Coppetts Wood Hospital, North London, of a heart attack while recovering from an AIDS-related illness on 21 December 1989.Bourland, W. I. (2019). "Night Moves". In Bloodflowers: Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Photography, and the 1980s (pp. 209–249). Duke University Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv11hpm2v.10 At the time of his death, he was living in Brixton, London, with his partner of six yearsBourland, W. Ian, "W. Ian Bourland on the Legacy of Rotimi Fani-Kayode", Duke University Press, 20 December 2019. and frequent collaborator Alex Hirst, who died of AIDS in 1992. Following Hirst's death, researchers have questioned whether the work that Fani-Kayode and Hirst created individually or as a team was accurately attributed to Fani-Kayode, Hirst, or the pair. GLBTQ: An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Culture.Bourland, W. I. (2019). "The Queen Is Dead". In Bloodflowers: Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Photography, and the 1980s. Duke University Press (pp. 146–170).
Legacy In 1988, Fani-Kayode with a number of other photographers, including Sunil Gupta, Monika Baker, Merle Van den Bosch, Pratibha Parmar, Ingrid Pollard, Roshini Kempadoo and Armet Francis, co-founded the Association of Black Photographers (now known as Autograph ABP)."Autograph Sees Light of Day", Autograph. . Many of these artists were featured in the 1986 exhibit Reflections of the Black Experience, at Brixton Artists Collective."Reflections of the Black Experience – 10 Black Photographers", Brixton 50, 1 March 1986. A prominent figure in the Black British art scene, Fani-Kayode served as the first chair of Autograph ABP and an active member of the Black Audio Film Collective.
Fani-Kayode challenged the invisibility of "African queerness", or the denial of alternative African sexualities, in both the Western and African worlds. In general, he sought to reshape the ideas of sexuality and gender in his photography, showing that sexuality and gender appear rigid and "fixed" because of cultural and social norms but are actually fluid and subjective. However, he specifically sought to develop queerness in contemporary African art, which required him to address the colonial and Christian legacies that suppressed queerness and constructed harmful notions of black masculinity. In a time when African artists were not being represented, he provocatively approached the issue by addressing and questioning the objectification of black bodies. His homoerotic influences in using the black male body can be interpreted as an expression of idealisation, of desire and being desired, and self-consciousness in response to the black body being reduced to a spectacle. He was able to show the world and those in the art world just how much queer black voices matter. Telling their sides of the story and not just being the subject of someone else's depiction of them.
Not only is Fani-Kayode praised for his conceptual imagery of Africanness and queerness (and African queerness), he is also praised for his ability to fuse racial and sexual politics with religious eroticism and beauty. One critic has also described his work as "neo-romantic", with the idea his images evoke a sense of fleeting beauty.
His work is imbued with subtlety, irony, and political and social comment. He also contributed to the artistic debate surrounding HIV/AIDS.Jean Marc Patras/ Galerie.
Collections Fani-Kayode is considered to be one of the most important artists of the 1980s, and his work appears in several public and private collections, including those of the Guggenheim Museum, Kiasma-Museum of Contemporary Art, Tate, The Hutchins Center, The Walther Collection, Victoria & Albert Museum, Yinka Shonibare CBE, and others."Race, Sexuality, Spirituality and the Self: The Photography of Rotimi Fani-Kayode". Autograph.
Exhibitions