Rotimi Fani-Kayode at Masculinities: Liberation through Photography

The work of the pioneering photographer Rotimi Fani-Kayode (1955–1989, Nigeria) calls attention to the politics of race, representation and queer desire. Fani-Kayode arrived in the UK at the age of eleven having fled the Nigerian Civil War, and his sensual black-and-white portraits, often taken in the studio, explore his experience of being an outsider, both sexually and geographically. Imbued with violence, in Untitled (Offering) Fani-Kayode substitutes the legendary black phallus with a pair of overlarge scissors, an act that not only turns an aspect of the black male body habitually appropriated by others into a threatening, even castrating, refusal, it also lends active agency to men more often glimpsed as the subject of another’s erotic vision. While in Bronze Head, the splayed bare buttocks of a black man are pictured squatting over, or being penetrated by, the mask of a Yoruba deity. In this work Fani-Kayode grapples with the problematic relationship between the medium of photography and its historical depictions of Africa.

What does it mean to be a man today? The Barbican's Masculinities: Liberation through Photography considers how masculinity has been coded, performed, and socially constructed from the 1960s to the present day.