Curators Courage Dzidula Kpodo, Maria Pia Bernardoni and Robin Beth Riskin reflect on expanding photographic language, revitalising historic sites, and charting new pathways toward freedom.
Good People, 2024. © Khanya Zibaya
LagosPhoto enters a new era in 2025. Transitioning into a biennial format and reopening the African Artists’ Foundation’s Lagos space, this edition marks a moment of reinvention for one of the continent’s most influential photographic platforms. Under the artistic direction of Azu Nwagbogu and led by curator Courage Dzidula Kpodo with co-curators Maria Pia Bernardoni and Robin Beth Riskin, the Biennale turns toward its theme of Incarceration — an expansive inquiry into the visible and invisible structures that shape collective and individual life.
Unfolding across Lagos and Ibadan, the festival activates landmark venues, from Freedom Park’s former colonial prison grounds to Demas Nwoko’s New Culture Studios. Through photography, moving image, sound, installation and archival intervention, LagosPhoto 2025 interrogates confinement while imagining new architectures of liberation. In this conversation, the curators reflect on collaboration, expanded media, and the evolving future of photographic practice in Africa.
‘Afrotopia’ presented at Freedom Park, LagosPhoto 2025. Courtesy of LagosPhoto 2025.
ART AFRICA: This year marks a pivotal transition for LagosPhoto, with its first biennial edition coinciding with the reopening of the African Artists’ Foundation in Lagos. How did these shifts shape your curatorial framework and ambitions for the 2025 programme?
Maria Pia Bernardoni (MPB): We are living in a moment saturated with images. Photography, video, and digital production circulate so widely and so quickly that the pace of cultural response often risks becoming superficial. For LagosPhoto 2025, it was essential to resist that pace. The biennial format gifted us something rare today: time. Time to think, to study, to reflect, and to respond with intention rather than acceleration.
This slower approach shaped our entire methodology. Instead of producing another fast-turnaround edition, we aimed for depth and coherence. The reopening of the African Artists’ Foundation’s physical space reinforced this, providing a concrete site for these ideas to take form. The Foundation’s return created a renewed sense of responsibility to produce a programme that is layered, rigorous, and meaningful.
Courage Dzidula Kpodo (CDK): The institutional shifts create a framework that encourages boldness. Moving to a biennial cycle opens the possibility of more extended research periods, allowing us to approach projects with greater nuance. It also enabled us to think more expansively about how LagosPhoto interacts with Lagos itself and other urban centers beyond. The reopening of the Foundation space is symbolic as much as practical: it signals continuity, resilience, and the ongoing importance of a physical meeting point for artistic and curatorial experimentation.
Didi Museum, LagosPhoto 2025. Courtesy of LagosPhoto 2025.
The curatorial theme, Incarceration, reimagines captivity as both a site of constraint and of transformation. What conceptual and emotional entry points guided your interpretation of this idea across the festival?
CDK: The theme, Incarceration, was proposed by Azu Nwagbogu, LagosPhoto’s founder and director. When we took it on as a team, we understood it not simply as a political idea but as a conceptual and emotional framework. We wanted to explore incarceration in its many manifestations: physical detention, psychological limitation, social restriction, spiritual confinement, environmental enclosure, and the subtler forms of captivity embedded in everyday life.
From the perspective of Lagos and West Africa, we also had to confront photography’s own complicities. Early photographic histories on the continent often depicted colonised subjects through carceral and reductive imagery. Those ways of seeing still echo today in structural, aesthetic, and representational forms. Our task was not to offer solutions but to map the tensions between captivity and aspiration, constraint and possibility.
The works gathered for LagosPhoto 2025 present incarceration as a field of struggle and imagination. They chart how freedom — individual or collective, material or metaphysical — can be excavated, mourned, resurrected or sought anew. We wanted audiences to inhabit these tensions rather than resolve them.
‘Afrotopia’ presented at Freedom Park, LagosPhoto 2025. Courtesy of LagosPhoto 2025.
From Ibadan to Freedom Park, this edition unfolds across multiple venues. How did spatial politics and Lagos’s urban geography shape your curatorial decisions?
CDK: Every space has a story. Even before an artwork is installed, the site already carries its own memories, tensions, and atmospheres. In curating LagosPhoto 2025, we chose to work with spaces that speak — places whose histories shape how artworks are read and felt. This produces a different kind of encounter than a white cube, where neutrality is assumed.
Freedom Park is a powerful example. Once the first colonial prison in Nigeria, it has been transformed into a public cultural space. Two of our exhibiting pavilions sit exactly where prison cells once stood. Hence, the works sited there — including those on ecological confinement, reimagined national futures, and transnational African connections — enter into an immediate dialogue with the architecture. The resonance between the works and the site generates an intensity that a neutral space could never produce.
In Ibadan, the New Culture Studios provided another compelling context. Designed by Demas Nwoko in 1967, the building embodies a history of communal creative experimentation. The projects installed there engage themes of death, the afterlife, and transcendence, in part because the building itself is a palimpsest of materials accumulated over time. Artists responded directly to its physicality and its legacy.
Across Lagos, we also partnered with a constellation of cultural spaces that reinforce the Foundation’s commitment to collaboration. Each venue extends the festival’s reach and allows different curatorial threads to resonate across the city.
choreopoem performance by Dr. Danielle Wood at New Culture Studios, LagosPhoto 2025. Courtesy of LagosPhoto 2025.
Photography remains central to LagosPhoto, yet this edition expands into sound, moving image, installation, and architectural collaboration. What does this expanded media ecology reveal about the evolving language of photographic practice today?
Robin Beth Riskin (RBR): Photography has always been more than a single medium. On the continent, artists have long worked in hybrid, interdisciplinary ways that echo and emerge from indigenous, ancestral, and communal practices. The separation of media was invented as part of a larger project to advance Western regimes and powers, and has since spread into a global phenomenon. In many African and diasporic contexts, however, art continues to play out through relational, spiritual, tactile, and layered mechanisms.
The future-facing shifts we are seeing today toward fluidity, collectivity and intersectionality can also be understood as a return of sorts. Artists are engaging sound, archival material, AI, installation, choreography, collage, and performance as extensions of photographic thinking, or with the photograph as a part of a bigger picture. The photograph can trigger memory, reshape narrative, codeswitch and shapeshift, or enter into conversation with other modes of perceiving and knowing. In this sense, it becomes not an endpoint, but a portal.
At LagosPhoto 2025, this expanded ecology manifested in various ways, for instance, with:
- Arnold Fokam’s urban landscapes painted and collaged with spiritual presences
- Khanya Zibaya’s layered, distorted, and reassembled portraits of political authority
- Alisa Martynova’s AI visuals of the “mental process of a machine.”
- Danielle Wood’s choreopoem blending movement, music, spoken word, text, and textile in a meditation on Harriet Jacobs’s escape from slavery and confinement
- In projects such as Kayanmata, The Beyond, A Place to Go, and Tender Photos’s Kindred, the image becomes a multilayered encounter — sonic, spatial, spiritual, archival, and collective.
Each of these artists uses photography as a point of entry rather than a limit. The festival itself becomes a testing ground for expanded practices. And Lagos — with its density, vitality, and simultaneous futurity and ancestry — is a vibrant place for experimenting with new forms of image-making and image-thinking.
The Re-enchantresses. © Arnold Tagne Fokam
The festival also engages deeply with archives, indigenous epistemologies, and intergenerational exchange. How do these approaches reframe what counts as photographic knowledge, and how might they challenge inherited Western methodologies of image and history?
RBR: One of the most radical shifts happening now in photography is the re-centring of indigenous knowledge as a critical lens. If Western modernity sought to categorise, separate, and objectify the world — placing people and images into extractive frameworks — then contemporary artists across the continent and diaspora are responding with methods that favour fluidity, relationality, and continuity.
I like to say that indigenous knowledge was contemporary before “the contemporary” had a name. When artists like Sadiq Al-Harasi sews thick red lines and figures onto pictures of roads in Yemen, or when Sumayah Fallatah overlays diasporic family photos with indigo dye from her maternal hometown, or when Ayobami Ogungbe weaves shorn photographs in the manner of Badagry basketry, or when Yagazie Emezi’s tapestries tap into cosmic Igbo patterns—they share a conversation not only with contemporary mixed media and archiving, but also with ancestral interdisciplinary and social-spiritual creation.
Today, “photography” can involve reworking existing materials, re-reading family albums, remixing public posters, or listening to the voices embedded within oral histories. Samuel Baah Kortey’s funerary light boxes, shown in dialogue with Emeka Ogboh’s mournful sound installation, offer a striking example: the artist becomes a gatherer and interpreter of cultural memory rather than a solitary creator of new images.
At LagosPhoto, we also rethink what constitutes an “image.” If light waves and sound waves share a vibrational nature, then why should images be restricted to retinal forms? Our captioning strategies reflect this thinking, at times incorporating artists’ voices, subjects’ testimonies, and collaborative texts. In projects such as Kayanmata, The Beyond, and A Place to Go, the image becomes a multilayered encounter — sonic, spatial, spiritual, archival, and collective.
African Artists’ Foundation reopening. Courtesy of LagosPhoto 2025.
Collaboration appears as both a curatorial method and a value system, evident in your work with one another and with artists across Africa and the diaspora. How do you sustain a collaborative process within such a dispersed and dynamic network, and what futures do you envision for LagosPhoto?
MPB: For nearly a decade, LagosPhoto has been one of the most collaborative curatorial environments I’ve worked in. Diversity of background, discipline, and perspective is not ornamental here — it is essential to how we think. Our process for the 2025 edition involved nine months of weekly curatorial meetings and two months of artist conversations. These sessions allowed us to test ideas from multiple vantage points and reach collective decisions.
Collaboration is not always easy, but it is generative. It counters the repetitiveness that can creep into festival structures. It opens space for productive disagreement. And ultimately, it strengthens the programme’s coherence by ensuring that each thread has been questioned, challenged, and deepened.
African Artists’ Foundation reopening. Courtesy of LagosPhoto 2025.
The 2025 edition emphasises transnational solidarity, from the Ghana–Nigeria “Jollof union” to partnerships with artists from Iran and beyond. In what ways do these global entanglements expand the festival’s discourse on incarceration, migration, and collective freedom?
RBR: LagosPhoto positions Lagos, Nigeria, West Africa, and the continent at large as centres surrounded by and connected to other centres, with the idea of “centrality” as multiple and shifting. This particular Fest happened to have 2/3 of our curating team from or connected to Ghana, and 2/3 of our curating team speaking French; so we were able to strengthen connections between the anglophone titans (Ghana and Nigeria), as well as strengthen relations with francophone neighbours from Senegal, Cameroon, Congo, Benin, Burundi and the diaspora in France. We likewise ended up with a strong pool of participants from the Middle East, whose stories of exile and displacement, migration and assimilation, resonated with projects on/of the continent and diaspora (Shirin Neshat, Rahi Rezvani, Alia Ali, and Al-Harasi, Fallatah and Lamees Saleh Sharf Eldin).
LagosPhoto 2025 has also been a wonderful opportunity to reflect and catalyse real-life connections amongst creative communities, with the exhibition behaving as not just a set of displays, but a tuner and shaper of production relations. This played out through collaborations between Kortey and Ogboh, Fibi Afloe and Ann Cassiman, Jesse Weaver Shipley and the late Gerald Annan-Forson, Anna Friemoth and her mother Penny Gentieu, and the Zinsou Archives with Postbox Ghana and me, Martine de Souza, and Alisa Martynova.
Breathwork I Keep My Visions To Myself. © Yagazie Emezi
Ultimately, LagosPhoto operates as both a festival and a movement, a platform for critical reflection and civic imagination. What futures do you envision for LagosPhoto within Africa’s broader cultural landscape, and how might this biennial model reimagine what an African photographic institution can be?
CDK: As for LagosPhoto’s future, the biennial model positions the festival to remain a leading platform for experimental photographic practice on the continent. It gives us time to develop themes, cultivate partnerships, and select sites that meaningfully engage cultural histories and contemporary urgencies.
We are already thinking toward 2027, which coincides with the 50th anniversary of FESTAC ’77. This will be a moment to revisit pan-African cultural solidarity and consider how LagosPhoto can contribute to new forms of artistic connection. The festival must continue to be a laboratory for storytelling, image-making, and self-determination — a place where African photographic futures can be imagined and tested with courage.
MPB: Ultimately, LagosPhoto is not just an exhibition platform. It functions as a living network of relationships. It safeguards cultural heritage while embracing change. And it models how an African photographic institution can be both rooted and porous, local and global, grounded in history and open to what comes next.
LagosPhoto Biennale 2025 runs until 29 November 2025. Explore the full programme at LagosPhoto Biennale.
