Rotimi Fani-Kayode, the Yoruban photographer of Black queer lifeworlds, is coming home. Nigerian curator Bisi Silva imagined this homecoming as a solo exhibition. It would take place in 2039 as part of a queer-friendly future in the Lagos art scene. In the epilogue of his 2019 book, Bloodflowers: Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Photography, and the 1980s, W. Ian Bourland reflects on Silva's speculative proposal. Bourland marks the ways in which Fani-Kayode's creative practice—bringing together homoerotic photography, Western art historical iconography, and African aesthetics—was far ahead of its time. One might read this hypothetical return as a call for historians of African art to take seriously the ongoing project of situating Rotimi Fani-Kayode's work as “in some crucial way, Yoruban” (p. 250).
Born in 1955 to an elite Yoruba family, Fani-Kayode spent the earliest years of his life in Lagos before moving to Brighton, England, in 1966, to escape the Nigerian-Biafran civil...