We are inviting you to celebrate the publication of the first monograph by our dear DAI tutor for over several years, Akinbode Akinbiyi! He has gained international acclaim as a photographer; and he is also an author, poet, tutor, and chronicler. When it comes to photography, the ephemeral and the ordinary are what catches his eye. Always wandering with his analogue Rolleiflex camera, he explores urban labyrinths, skilfully capturing transient moments, situations, and fragments of time. Through his lens, he is dedicated to capturing the in-between—fleeting gestures, unusual situations, and fragmented moments woven into the fabric of social, often urban, settings. The book is going to be published in 2024 by Kunstverein Hannover and Archive Books.
Akinbode Akinbiyi (b. 1946 in Oxford) is a renowned photographer. Not only has he been honored with the Goethe Medal and the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, but was also recently awarded the 2024 Hannah Höch Prize in recognition of his outstanding lifetime achievement in the field. After a B.A. English degree from Ibadan University, Nigeria, Akinbiyi returned to Europe, where he took up photography, both as a profession and in personal work on large, sprawling megacities. The narrative in the labyrinthian weave of city streets, wandering quietly and gently on hectic highways and less frenetic byways, eyes acute to the immediacy of the here and now and simultaneously the faraway oblique horizon. “Passageways, Involuntary Narratives, and the Sound of Crowded Spaces”, 2016 -2017, was a body of work shown during documenta 14 in both Athens and Kassel, and that to date encapsulates this constantly evolving wandering.
As Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung puts it in An Ongoing Offcoming Tale. Ruminations on Art, Culture, Politics and Us/Others (2022): “Akinbode Akinbiyi is, by way of photography and poetry, a chronicler of the quotidian. He is interested in ‘everydaylifeness’ rather than everydayness; two states differentiated by Akinbiyi’s profound interest in being-human beings, among other beings, and the way that they craft, navigate, and relate to societies and spaces.”
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