Rotimi Fani-Kayode – Under the Surplice / Nothing to Lose IV + X / Bronze Head

Rotimi Fani-Kayode – Under the Surplice / Nothing to Lose IV + X / Bronze Head

© Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Courtesy of Autograph ABP

‘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 concepts of reality become ambiguous and are opened to reinterpretation. This requires what Yoruba priests and artists call a technique of ecstasy.’ R. F.-K.

 

In his photographs, Rotimi Fani-Kayode takes up ritual and visual traditions of the Nigerian Diaspora. But his homoerotic representations are consciously not traditionalist. They originate from contemporary debates of the 1980s around body art and staged photography. These sexualized appropriations of Yoruba motifs also evoke the fetishization of Nigerian masks by the canonized fathers of modern art. These used their own primitivist projections of looted African art at the beginning of the 20th century as a source of inspiration.