Akinbode Akinbiyi is a chronicler of the everyday. Or, as Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, curator and artistic director of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), put it: the artist is less interested in “everydayness” than in “everydaylifeness:”1 day-to-day life, or more precisely, the things that shape and occupy people’s daily routines, what animates them. He often strolls at a deliberately slow pace through cities, many of them megacities like Bamako, Cairo, Dakar, Kinshasa, São Paulo, capturing points of interest with his analogue twin-lens Rolleiflex camera.
The title of the exhibition references a passage in Ndikung’s essay on the artist’s practice, which reads:
“(…) sometimes to be lost is to be found, and to be found is to be lost anew.”
Yet it also signifies, especially in the context of wandering through urban landscapes, the act of losing oneself—of embracing the possibility of losing one’s way.
The exhibition features over 100 new photographic works, most of which were created in Hannover. They are grouped into chapters with the titles: Fun and Games, Afrikanisches Viertel (African Quarter), Rituale (Rituals), Passageways, Wie wir wohnen (How we live), Hauptstadtblues (Capital city blues), Automaten (Automats) and Details.
Akinbiyi has documented a wide array of moments and situations in Hannover, captured the in-between and arranged them into compositions. These works offer insights into the state capital, revealing glimpses and details from the lives of its inhabitants. There is also a series made in Berlin, which shows aspects of the German capital.
As an interactive installation, a photo booth will be set up on site to allow visitors to take a self-portrait (selfie). The selfie will then be combined in a four-image grid with a random selection of three of Akinbiyi’s motifs, resulting in a personalized, postcard-sized artwork that visitors can take home.
The photo booth was initially presented in 2020 as part of Paranoia TV during the steirischer herbst festival in Graz, where the artist had previously collaborated with Kunstverein director Christoph Platz-Gallus.
at Kunstverein Hannover
until January 21, 2024