Witness the Energy, Wit and Beauty of Rotimi Fani-Kayode’s Art

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 a feeling of having very little to lose.

Intimate, bold and yet completely relatable, Rotimi Fani-Kayode’s 1988 essay “Traces of Ecstasy” provides a powerful summation of the Nigerian artist’s photographs.

His experiences of dislocation, informed by his life as a refugee, his homosexuality and the racism that he describes as an “inevitability” as an African artist in the West are all examined with bracing clarity. All the major themes in Fani-Kayode’s body of work begin with the body itself.

Fani-Kayode used his own physicality as a springboard, or maybe more accurately as a portal — it’s a through-the-looking-glass apparatus to talk about race, culture, desire and death, all embodied, quite literally, in skin, bone and flesh.

Organized by Autograph (London), the Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus) and currently on display at the Polygon Gallery in North Vancouver, Rotimi Fani-Kayode: Tranquility of Communion is an exhaustive show. I mean that in a good way. It offers the full scope of Fani-Kayode’s work in all its richness and resplendence. This fulsome arc is useful to situate him not only within the social and cultural context in which he made the work, but also what it means in the current moment.

Born into a prominent Nigerian family, Fani-Kayode emigrated to the U.K. in 1966 when he was 11 years old. He moved to the U.S. to start college in the early 1970s. He completed a business degree at Georgetown University in 1976 before getting his MFA in fine arts and photography at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 1983.

Fani-Kayode’s immersion in the U.S. coincided with the birth of the gay rights movement. The hard partying, freewheeling ways of the 1970s, in all its joyous raunch, found its way into his work.

Organized into sections that feature work from different periods of the artist’s life, the exhibition isn’t strictly chronological. The first images to greet you are those created just before Fani-Kayode’s death in 1989. He suffered heart failure at age 34 after contracting meningitis.

It’s tempting to wonder what he would have created had he lived longer. But the work that he did make is astounding in its energy, wit and lusty beauty.

Life, death and desire

Sex is a big part of the show. The full-frontal depictions of men being with other men run from the artist’s early drawings and polaroids that feature Fani-Kayode and his friends dressed up in glittering club attire, to the latter series Nothing to Lose (Bodies of Experience), a collection of large-scale, colour-drenched photographs completed not long before Fani-Kayode’s death in 1989.

These photographs, moving in a narrative flow, feature the artist and other models in a variety of poses. Props in the form of bondage gear or splendiferous bird of paradise flowers add a lush, hothouse quality to the work. Kink is clearly evident, but the emphasis on sexuality is cut through with a good dose of humour.

The collection brings together life, death and desire in a crucible of super-saturated colour and form.

As much a meditation on traditional Yoruba culture as queer identity, the images move in different ways, infused with a sense of drama and theatricality.

The beauty is undeniable, but there is no preciousness or pretence. Instead, there is a juicy montage of sexual passion, romantic love and carnal lust transmuted through the lens of art history and traditional culture.

At first glance, it’s an easy correlation to draw between Fani-Kayode’s work and the photographs of American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. The two were working in the same milieu and the same time. Both featured naked male bodies as well as bondage gear in their artwork. But there are a number of key differences.

The cool, fetishized stance that makes Mapplethorpe’s images feel slightly exploitive of Black bodies does not exist in Fani-Kayode’s work.

The Nigerian artist’s approach is fundamentally different. There’s no distance at all, cool or otherwise. Fani-Kayode’s photographs brim with warmth and easy affection. He is never not present, either in physical form (many images are self-portraits) or in spirit.

Even when he isn’t in the frame, there is a sense that all the people featured in the photographs are friends, lovers and close colleagues, all having a laugh or making something beautiful together. It is serious, but never self-serious.

Much has been written about how shock cannot sustain itself over the long haul.

Mapplethorpe’s images of fisting and other sex acts seem dated or at least very much of an era, whereas Fani-Kayode’s still feel immediate and necessary in a way that even other contemporary photographers like Martine Gutierrez do not.

What could easily curdle into vanity, self-regard or indulgence is mediated through an intellectual engagement with larger and arguably older cultural influences. This is especially evident in Fani-Kayode’s investigations with Yoruba culture.

Fani-Kayode’s most recognizable image, Bronze Head, features the sculptural bust of a Yoruba deity nestled between the muscular backside of a Black man. At first glance, it recalls sex, birth, defecation or even a particularly challenging sex toy.

In talking about his work, the artist summed up these multiple readings: “My identity has been constructed from my own sense of otherness, whether cultural, racial or sexual…The three aspects are not separate within me.

“Photography is the tool by which I feel most confident in expressing myself. It is photography therefore — Black, African, homosexual photography — which I must use not just as an instrument, but as a weapon.”

Religious symbols from the Western world and Yoruba make for interesting bedfellows.

In Adebiyi (1989), based on Eshu, a trickster figure among the Yoruba Orishas (deities), a man poses with what looks to be an authentic mask. But this is not exactly as it appears; the mask featured in the image is a replica. It throws into question the evolving nature of cultural history itself.

Another aspect that informed Fani-Kayode’s work was the HIV/AIDS crisis and the generation of gay men who succumbed to the disease. An elegiac quality emerges in the artist’s latter work, evidenced by his use of props like clear plastic tubing that refer to medical treatment.

In the final section of the exhibition, Fani-Kayode’s process is featured with blown-up versions of photographic contact sheets, complete with grease-pencil circled images that denote which photographs to print. It’s another reminder that the artist was working in a very different time.

Rough, raunchy, but brimming with ribald joy and pleasure, Fani-Kayode was the centre of the scene with the Brixton Art Gallery in London. In an interview with Dennis Carney, a model and friend of the artist, the time and place that infused much of Fani-Kayode’s work is summoned, in all of its specificity.

This informing element is further unpacked in a short BBC documentary, featured in the part of the show focused on the artist’s process.

One interview features Alex Hirst, Fani-Kayode’s partner. Hirst talks about the pair’s first meeting in the summer of 1983, when Fani-Kayode showed up at Hirst’s office dressed in bright yellow pants, a black leather cap and packing an extensive portfolio.

As Hirst explains, he’d never seen anyone quite like him. The two became lovers and collaborators, working on different projects until Fani-Kayode’s death.

Hirst died in 1992, three years after his partner passed. But in silver gelatin prints, the two are captured in their youthful physicality, often intertwined in poses that speak to deep affection as well as a powerful erotic charge.

Exquisitely staged and lit so they resemble Renaissance figures, their bodies curl over and around each other. It’s a circularity that speaks of deep intimacy and infinite tenderness. It is very beautiful.

‘Rotimi Fani-Kayode: Tranquility of Communion’ is at the Polygon Gallery in North Vancouver until May 25, 2025.