Rotimi fani kayode biography of martin lewis

He created the bulk of his work between and , the year he died from AIDS-related complications. His mother was Chief Mrs. Adia Adunni Fani-Kayode nee Sa'id The Fani-Kayode family moved to Brighton , England, in , after the military coup and the ensuing civil war in Nigeria. After graduating from Pratt, Fani-Kayode returned to the UK, [ 7 ] 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, [ 12 ] sexuality , racism, colonialism and the tensions and conflicts between his homosexuality and his Yoruba upbringing. Fani-Kayode stated that his parents were devotees of Ifa , the oracle orisha , and keepers of Yoruba shrines, [ 8 ] 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 Describing his art as "Black, African, homosexual photography," [ 16 ] Fani-Kayode and many others considered him to be an outsider and a depiction of diaspora.

"I'm defining the space that I want to hold, and that's one where I'm interested in conversation and collaboration.

He believed that due to this depiction of himself, it helped shape his work as a photographer. His exile from Nigeria at an early age affected his sense of wholeness. He experienced feeling like he had "very little to lose. 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.