In series such as Nothing to Lose, Rotimi Fani-Kayode appropriated images from the religious practices of his Yoruba ancestors and made it his own.Autograph, London/Supplied
Photographer Rotimi Fani-Kayode has sometimes been hailed as Britain’s Black Robert Mapplethorpe: Both were gay men who created erotic images of naked male bodies, and both died prematurely in 1989 during the AIDS crisis. But beyond that, the comparison isn’t really up to the task of introducing the Nigerian-British artist to North Americans.
As revealed by a first-ever major museum survey now stopping in North Vancouver, Fani-Kayode was both less slick and more complex in work that was not merely aesthetic, but also deeply spiritual. If Mapplethorpe objectified beautiful bodies (and flowers), Fani-Kayode sought a place where the physical and the spiritual co-existed.
He did this by appropriating imagery drawn from the religious practices of his Yoruba ancestors and making it his own. Born into a prominent Nigerian family that fled the civil war triggered by the secession of Biafra in 1967, Fani-Kayode came to England as a teenager and studied in the United States before returning to London in 1983 to establish himself as an artist. He described himself as an outsider on three fronts: separated from Nigeria, from heterosexuality and from middle-class professionalism of the kind valued by his parents.
Umbrella of 1987, silver-gelatin print.Autograph, London/Supplied
This was why he felt he had Nothing to Lose – the title of a final series of large-scale, chromogenic prints created around 1989. The exhibition at the Polygon Gallery in North Vancouver begins at his career’s end, showing an entire suite of these arresting colour images of Black men decorated with African masks, face paint, exaggerated phalluses, vegetation, flowers and fruit. Staged in dramatic chiaroscuro lighting that emphasizes burnished Black skin, they are both theatrical and intriguing, hinting at vast depths beneath their bold iconography.
Some of these figures were friends who modelled for the photographer; sometimes he used his own body, but the faces are often obscured, and the images are not portraits but evocations of a wild intersection of the sexual and the transcendent. In one a whole crab shell blocks a man’s mouth and nostrils while a crown of flowering branches partly obscures his eyes; in another, a figure with a bird of paradise flower throws back his head as if in ecstasy, his mouth plugged with a lime.
Occasionally, the artist directly confronts sexual stereotypes of Black men: In one image, a figure’s large yellow phallus is supported by string, as if his sex were walking a tightrope. But more often, the images are more sensual than sexual.
Fani-Kayode was one of the founders of Autograph, the London photography centre dedicated to issues of race, representation and human rights, and the organizer of this show, which toured to the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, before arriving in Canada. Having revealed Fani-Kayode’s triumphant late work right at the start, the exhibition then provides an archive of his early work where you can see him preparing his themes with homoerotic figure sketches or Polaroids of his friends striking poses or trying on costumes.
Curated by Autograph executive director Mark Sealy, the show also offers a large selection of Fani-Kayode’s black-and-white silver gelatin prints from the late 1980s. Here, you do see some visual similarity with Mapplethorpe, that master of technique, as Fani-Kayode shoots naked figures in unusual poses often with a single prop: a bowler hat hiding the head of a man sitting cross-legged and seen from behind; a man dangling a large pair of scissors in front of his face; an umbrella obscuring the face of a man perched on a stool.
The eroticism – and the exoticism – is less forceful than in the colour prints, and it might be easy to miss the impact of these images simply because there is a whole room full of them. But each one is a small marvel, an arresting composition with a thought-provoking juxtaposition that insists on the humanity of a naked figure even as it eschews its individuality.
Looking at Fani-Kayode’s earlier pieces, you occasionally get a strong whiff of 1980s romanticism or excess. But the mature photography is too original to feel dated. Autograph has uncovered a neglected body of work that stands the test of time.
Rotimi Fani-Kayode: Tranquility of Communion continues at the Polygon Gallery in North Vancouver to May 25.
