2023 12

Circumnavigating the City

Vortrag Akinbode Akinbiyi



Fotos © Akinbode Akinbiyi, Laura Michèle Kniesel, 2023
Text © Akinbode Akinbiyi
Akinbode Akinbiyi born in Oxford, England of Nigerian parents, studied in Nigeria, England and in Germany. B.A. English, Ibadan University. He has been a freelance photographer since 1977.

Akinbiyi´s primary photographic focus is large, sprawling megacities. Wandering and meandering the highways and byways in an attempt to understand and deeply engage with the modern metropolis. He walks and works primarily in and on the four major African cities Lagos, Cairo, Kinshasa and Johannesburg, but also wanders in other major cities, Khartoum, Addis Ababa, Dakar, Bamako, to name some. European, North and South American cities are also serious destinations., so recently Sao Paulo and in 2019 Chicago. There is no one viewpoint or way of working, wandering. The work is open-ended and driven by a desire to delve as deeply as possible into the meaning, the subjectivity of everyday.

Akinbiyi also works as a curator and has given photographic workshops internationally - in Germany, Nigeria, Sudan, Sweden, England, the United States, Greece. He showed his retrospective at Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin in 2020 and exhibited at documenta 14. Recent exhibitions have been at MoMA, New York and Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin.

︎︎︎ Akademie der Bildenden Künste Nürnberg