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    Artist Spotlight: Rotimi Fani-Kayode

    Christopher Harrity

    Christopher Harrity is the Manager of Online Production for Here Media, parent company to The Advocate and Out. He enjoys assembling online features on artists and photographers, and you can often find him poring over the mouldering archives of the magazines.
    Christopher Harrity is the Manager of Online Production for Here Media, parent company to The Advocate and Out. He enjoys assembling online features on artists and photographers, and you can often find him poring over the mouldering archives of the magazines.
    Read Full Bio
    Christopher Harrity
    04/30/12
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    Maternal Milk, 1986 30 x 30 in.

    © Rotimi Fani-Kayode / Courtesy of The Walther Collection and Autograph ABP, London

    As a Nigerian-born photographer who lived and worked in the U.K., Fani-Kayode was active in the gay political response to the HIV/AIDS crisis and was a leading voice among black British artists during the flourishing queer culture of the late 1980s. Influenced by his experience as an African exile in Europe and his spiritual heritage — his family were keepers of the shrine of Yoruba deities in Ife, Nigeria — Fani-Kayode staged and photographed performances in his studio in which the black male body served as a means of expressing the boundaries between spiritual and erotic fantasy.

    Like his contemporaries Derek Jarman and David Wojnarowicz, Fani-Kayode positioned his photography as a public and political act, even while he broke with the predominant approach of documentary realism practiced by many black and African Diaspora artists. For Fani-Kayode, the imaginative space of the studio allowed him to create new icons whose sexuality and keen sense of mortality offered a vision of the black body outside of common Western perceptions.

    “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,” Fani-Kayode said. “Such a position gives me the feeling of having very little to lose.”

    “Nothing to Lose,” the first New York solo exhibition of his photographs, presents large-scale color and black-and-white portraits created in the late 1980s by Fani-Kayode, before his untimely death in 1989. The exhibit can be viewed through July 28 at The Walther Collection Project Space, 526 W. 26th St., Suite 718, New York, NY 10001

    For more information: walthercollection.com

    Click on thumbnails below to see complete seletion of images.

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    Maternal Milk, 1986 30 x 30 in.
    Half Opened Eyes Twins, 1989 24 x 24 in.
    Sonponnoi, 1987 20 x 24 in.
    Under the Surplice, 1989 20 x 24 in.
    Nothing to Lose IV, 1989 48.43 x 47.95 in.
    Nothing to Lose I, 1989 48.43 x 47.95 in.
    Nothing to Lose XII, 1989 48.43 x 47.95 in.
    Untitled, 1987-1988 48.43 x 47.95 in.
    Every Moment Counts, 1989 48.43 x 47.95 in.
    Every Moment Counts, 1989 48.43 x 47.95 in.
    Nothing to Lose VII, 1989 48.43 x 47.95 in.
    Artist Spotlight
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