Rotimi fani kayode masque dance
•
A seminal figure in Black British photography circles in the 1980s, Rotimi Fani-Kayode’s practice was informed by an unflinching interrogation of the intersections between queerness, spirituality, and the African masculinized body. Produced in 1987, Sonponnoi shows the almost naked torso and thighs of a young Black man. Black, white, and pink spots are painted on the figure’s body, whose hands hold five candles—each lit with glowing tongues of fire—between his thighs. Sculptural representations of the Yoruba god of earth and disease, Ṣọ̀pọ̀na, referenced by the work’s title, often depict him as covered with coloured spots. Yet Ṣọ̀pọ̀na is also the god of healing in Yoruba mythology—emphasizing the nuance between and around binaries such as healthy/diseased. One of Fani-Kayode’s last works Every Moment Counts shows the naked back of a young Black man, who is crunched forward in a pose that makes him particularly vulnerable to the photogra
•
Categories
Grapes, 1989 © Rotimi Fani-Kayode, courtesy Autograph ABP & Tiwani Contemporary, London.
This text was written for Photomonitor in response to Rotimi Fani-Kayode (1955 – 1989) at Tiwani Contemporay, London, in collaboration with Autograph ABP (19 September 2014 – 1 November 2014). Published: 4 October 2014.
Rotimi Fani-Kayode articulated three forms of displacement: ‘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 the sort of respectably married professional my parents might have hoped for’. [1] The question of displacement is never resolved. Historical tensions between those who appear certain of their citizenship (of their status in the world as social and political beings) and those who occupy spaces that are less sure, somewhat precarious, remain.
Much has been written about Fani-Kayode whose father, a prominent Yoruba political figure and leader, Chief Remi F
•
Rotimi Fani-Kayode’s potent portraiture explores desire and ecstasy
For Fani-Kayode, who was born into a Yoruba family in Lagos before they were exiled to England following the civil war in Nigeria in 1966, the studio and his broader practice became a space where he attempted to work through this geographical displacement, his sexuality and the subsequent isolation he experienced from his Nigerian heritage. More crucially, the studio allowed Fani-Kayode to imagine and make visible a visual language of Black African gay imagination that was sorely lacking in photography at the time. He did this by positioning the Black male bodies in his photographs in tandem with Yoruba traditions and deities, sometimes overtly in the form of a mask that obscures the subject’s face and other times through gesture and pose.
According to Sealy, Fani-Kayode's photography broke through the deeply theoretical spaces of art history and Yoruba spirituality and invoked a truly hybrid natur to the wo