Rotimi Fani-Kayode

Born 1955 in Lagos, Nigeria
Died 1989 in London, England

Art Gallery of New South Wales

Untitled 1987–88
archival C-type print

Untitled 1987–88
archival C-type print

Sonponnoi 1987
silver gelatin print

Courtesy the artist’s estate and Autograph, London

For the Yoruba people of West Africa, to utter the name Sopona is to invite pestilence into one’s life. Known as a god of smallpox and other infectious diseases, Sopona gives what he can also take away. With the right dedication, he is able to heal the same damage that he inflicts.

Fleeing post-independence turmoil in Nigeria with his prominent political family, Rotimi Fani-Kayode spent time in New York in the early 1980s, before racism and the emerging HIV pandemic drove him to London. There, when met with the same challenges, the artist began photographing portraits of Black men dancing and exalting in recollections of the hallucinatory rituals of Yoruba priests.

Scintillatingly sexual and alive with the spirit of his subjects, Fani-Kayode’s work draws influences from his own culture, including Yoruba religious references; the studio practice of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe; the light and shadow of 16th-century chiaroscuro masters; and the bodily arrangements of the likes of Michelangelo.

Leaving behind a body of work alight with both his and his community’s queer Black energy, Fani-Kayode died of an AIDS related illness just six years after he arrived in London. The portrait Sonponnoi depicts a faceless figure adorned in the spots commonly found in representations of Sopona; he carries a small candle in an incidental tribute to an artist whose life was marked for brevity by the same forces that made it worth living.

Read more about the 24th Biennale of Sydney, Ten Thousand Suns, by purchasing the catalogue here.