This year, Akinbode Akinbiyi received the highest award given by the city of Berlin to artists: the Hannah Höch Prize. This award celebrates the outstanding lifetime achievements of artists over 60 years old with deep ties to the city. Akinbiyi, who has lived in Berlin for over three decades, partnered with the Berlinishe Galerie to present an overview of his photography career from the 1970s to today as part of that prize.
Akinbiyi crafted his oeuvre with an analog camera while wandering the streets of Berlin and African megacities. He captures spontaneous moments that reveal layers of artifacts from past peoples and political systems. Although his photographs appear documentary, Akinbiyi makes his photographs by carefully choosing his subjects, timing, framing, and mode of display. He situates his photographs in long-running series, some of which have been growing since his career began in the 1970s.
Through his exhibition, you can crisscross the former German empire, visit Nigeria, Brazil, and South Africa, and discover remnants of colonialism in the streets of Berlin. His work offers unexpected humor, softness, poignancy, and a bit of cleverness.
Reflections of Akinbode Akinbiyi’s transatlantic biography
Akinbiyi’s work starkly reflects his biography. The artist was born to Nigerian parents in Oxford, England, in 1946, when Great Britain still controlled Nigeria as one of its colonies. Akinbiyi grew up between England and Lagos and attended universities in Nigeria, Lancaster, and Heidelberg to study English literature and German philology with the goal of becoming a writer. But, at 26, he started taking photographs without formal training. He picked up an analog SLR camera made by Rolleiflex and wandered. A magazine hired him to photograph African cities in 1987, setting him on his artistic path. Since 1991, Akinbiyi has made Berlin his base while continuing to travel and photograph cities across the African continent.
Echos of colonialism in Berlin: the “African Quarter” series
Akinbiyi demonstrates his deep connection with Berlin and its people in his ongoing series “African Quarter.” The series includes photographs of racist artifacts from the past and present, along with contemporary relics of agency and activism enacted by Black people interrupting oppressive stereotypes.
The “African Quarter” in Akinbiyi’s photographs is a small neighborhood near the center of town that resulted from the city’s efforts to create a zoo at the beginning of the 20th century. The zoo originated with an animal trafficker named Carl Hagenbeck, who wanted to display animals and humans taken from Germany’s colonies in Africa. The city started building Hagenbeck’s zoo and named the streets surrounding it after German colonizers and regions colonized by Germany on the African continent. But the First World War ended the building of the zoo, and the city turned the land into a park known today as Volkspark Rehberge. (Hagenbeck’s career also ended abruptly when a snake bit and killed him in 1913, which seems like an appropriate end.) However, the street names remained. They stood for over a hundred years as monuments to the German Empire’s violent seizure of territories and peoples on the African continent between 1871 and 1918.
Since the 1980s, decolonial and anti-racist groups have campaigned for the street names to be changed. In one of Akinbiyi’s works, he captures their unofficial renaming of a street to Witbooi-Alle in 2005. The photograph shows the official street sign for “Peters-Allee,” named initially for Carl Peters, a colonial administrator well-known for his brutality. By the time Akinbiyi photographed the sign, the Berlin government had tried to assuage campaigners by changing the street’s eponym, visible in the small plaque above the sign. This switch certainly didn’t go far enough to rectify the situation. The activist covered the sign with “Witoobi-Allee,” to honor Hendrick Witbooi, the chief of the IKhowesin people who led the Nama people during their revolts against the German colonial empire in present-day Namibia. The German military killed him in battle on 29 October 1905. About 65,000 Herero people and half of the Nama tribe were killed from 1904-5 after they challenged Germany’s oppressive colonial rule. This work left a lasting impact. In 2016, the Berlin-Mitte district council made the first official name changes. Today, the contested street has a new name that honors the Namibian activist Anna Mungunda (1932-1959). Other street names also celebrate those who resisted German colonial rule, including Cornelius Fredericks and the Manga Bell couple. Additional neighborhoods across the city are following suit.
Akinbiyi’s long-running series captures these physical transformations that represent the city’s embedded coloniality and the work of its citizens who have worked to change it. It’s also visible in his photographs of billboards, paintings, train stations, and other aspects of daily life in the neighborhood.
At the center of the arts in Berlin: the “Portrait” series
Since moving to Berlin, Akinbiyi has photographed the artists, curators, activists, and writers who flocked to the city after reunification. He approaches his portraits of them like he approaches the city streets — without staging or posing. The individuals appear deep in thought or conversation and embedded in their environments. Photographer Arno Fischer observes something closely, but all the photograph reveals is the intensity of his gaze. Artist Nan Goldin looks out the window of the gallery of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), but all we see is the light bathing her. The German poet and activist May Ayim turns away from a microphone in an empty auditorium. All appear fully alive and embodied.
Placing Berlin in a global context: Legos, Brasilia, and Durban
Akinbiyi has traveled extensively, and many of his global series demonstrate his interest in interrupting racial stereotypes with the nuances of traditions and contemporary existence. His ongoing series “Photography, Tobacco, Sweets, Condoms, and Other Configurations” contains photographs that highlight similarities in cities worldwide. He shares the literal trashiness of Berlin (reminding European viewers that they’ve forgotten their own “dirtiness” when holding derogatory assumptions of “dirty” African cities), the role of photography as a mechanism for creativity and state control everywhere, and the impacts of coloniality. The short series “Fences” looks at moments across the globe through literal fences. Photographs taken in Berlin, Chicago, Lagos, and other cities blur together as chainlink fences (or fences similarly shaped) define the foregrounds of each picture—sharp diamond patterns cut through images of kids playing soccer and basketball. The delineation of the porous but impassable barriers brings into focus the inaccessibility of porches and building lots. Regardless of location, fences shape human relationships and create emotional responses on both sides of the barrier.
The exhibition includes several series of works completed entierly outside of Berlin, highlighting the nuance and history of cities in Africa and South America. In “Black Spirituality,” Akinbiyi represents a religious exchange that accompanied the slave trade and its lasting impacts. The photographs, this time in color, portray contemporary manifestations of the Yoruba and catholic religions in Brasilia. In the 1800s, Yoruba people from southwestern Nigeria and southeastern Benin were enslaved and sent to Brazil. They labored to maintain their belief in the “Òrìṣàs,” the ritualism, and the traditions of the Yoruba religion despite Brazil’s ban on speaking their language and practicing their cultural traditions and religions. Their descendants carefully continued these practices and eventually formed the Candomblé religion, which blends some Catholic ideas into their own traditional beliefs. When some members of this group returned to Africa after Brazil banned enslavement in 1888, they brought their mixed practices with them. Akinbiyi surfaces these spiritual practices with photographs of contemporary participants, ritualistic food sacrifices, and religious leaders. He also includes Catholic structures built in the style of European modernism, which raises additional questions about power and influence. Together, the series raises questions of tradition, power, and adaptation.
The intricacies, energy, and people of his second home, Legos, comprise the two final series in the exhibition. The series “Legos: All Roads” creates a patchwork portrait of Lagos — his forty-year attempt to present the city’s essence. It includes photographs of people, billboards, architecture, traffic jams, and telephone lines, all of which Akinbiyi took while wandering aimlessly through the streets with his camera. In contrast, the series “Sea Never Dry” portrays a quieter public recreation zone on Victoria Island in Lagos. The photographs capture everyday life along the shore, including spiritual practices, plastic waste, tourists, and musicians. Unlike most of Akinbiyi’s work, signage, text, and the layers of city walls are almost absent in these photographs. Despite this void, colonialism still makes its appearance. After all, the island eponym is Queen Victoria (1819-1901), so named under the Bricolonializationation of Nigeria. The title of the series derives from an expression common along the Atlantic coast of Africa that celebrates how trusting in the ceaseless power of the ocean produces hope. Unfortunately, flooding and marine erosion due to rising sea levels, land reclamation schemes, and high levels of plastic waste in the water threaten Legos.
Akinbode Akinbiyi: photographing cmlexity while wandering
All of the work on display at the Berlinische Galerie emphasizes the unexpected complexity of the street. His spontaneous photographs taken during long rambles through cities highlight the embedded histories we live with and often overlook. Take a moment to look slowly around you as you walk — you’ll likely find stories of power and agency in unexpected places.