Akinbode Akinbiyi: Sometimes to be lost is to be found

“Passersby are acknowledged, especially in the early morning hours. Voiced good mornings, the friendly nod of knowing, the beginning of the workday. The pathway, the pavement, the road are essential passageways, laid out and carefully maintained, leading somewhere, the necessity of forward motion. The wanderer however disrupts this organic forward surge, from time to time completely standing still and turning around, looking back, taking in the view from another angle.” —Akinbode Akinbiyi

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.

Yet Akinbiyi is not just a photographer; 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 meandering with his analogue Rolleiflex camera, he explores urban labyrinths, skillfully capturing fleeting moments, situations, and moments in time. Through his lens, he is dedicated to capturing the in-between—fleeting gestures, unusual situations, and transitory moments woven into the fabric of social, often urban, settings. 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.”

In preparation for his solo exhibition at Kunstverein Hannover, Akinbiyi spent nearly a year traveling between Berlin—his home of three decades—and Hannover, diving deep into urban rituals, Hannover’s “African Quarter,” revealing the specifics of the city’s colonial past, and continuing his larger series “Passageways.” Akinbiyi makes visible that which has been overlooked, shines a light on what would otherwise remain hidden. What he captured has been organized into chapters, collections that are far more than mere scrapbooks. They are, in essence, coordinate systems that can be interpreted as the result of an artistic cartography, carefully structured both in space and time. He has mastered the art of street photography, sharing with us that which exists in plain sight. It’s just that we don’t see it (anymore).

Kunstverein Hannover and Archive Books will publish the artist’s first monograph in early 2024. 

Sometimes to be lost is to be found is curated by Christoph Platz-Gallus.

Akinbode Akinbiyi
Born 1946 in Oxford, England. School education and university studies in Nigeria, England, and Germany. B.A. in English linguistics at the University of Ibadan and studies of German Linguistics in Heidelberg. Freelance photographer since 1977. 1987 STERN Fellowship for Journalists in Lagos, Kano, and Dakar. 1993 co-founder of UMZANZSI, a cultural center in the Clermont Township in Durban, South Africa. Co-initiator and mentoring role at the Centres of Learning for Photography in Africa organized by the Goethe-Institut Nigeria, co-curator of the Bamako Biennale for Photography in 2001, 2003, 2019, and 2022. Akinbiyi lives and works in Berlin.

Akinbode Akinbiyi: Sometimes to be lost is to be found is supported by Stiftung Kunstfonds, Stiftung Niedersachsen, and the Lower Saxony Ministry of Science and Culture.

Press contact: Olga Nevzorova, presse [​at​] kunstverein-hannover.de