By Abodunrin Akintayo
At MADS Kigali, Funmilayo Kayode’s Èkó Akété: Fragments of a Living City unfolds as a precise and affecting meditation on Lagos as image, memory, pressure, and myth. Presented as a solo exhibition from 2-30 March 2023, the body of work brings together a series of fine art photographs that examine the contemporary city through architecture, commerce, public symbolism, cultural inheritance, and the unstable theatre of everyday urban life.
The title draws from a historic Yorùbá praise name for Lagos, immediately placing the project within a layered cultural field. Èkó Akété is not merely a geographic reference; it is an invocation. It allows Kayode to approach Lagos as a site of ancestral resonance and contemporary urgency, a city where memory is not preserved in silence but carried through markets, monuments, unfinished buildings, damaged structures, public murals, and human movement. The result is a body of work that resists the simplification of Lagos into either spectacle or chaos. Instead, Kayode presents the city as a living cultural organism, one constantly negotiating between survival and aspiration, ruin and renewal, spiritual memory and material transformation.
The installation itself is central to the reading of the work. Across the gallery wall, Kayode’s framed photographs are given space to breathe. Their placement within a clean architectural interior, surrounded by sculptural and craft-based objects, creates a compelling tension between the density of Lagos and the quietness of the exhibition space. This contrast heightens the photographs’ formal intelligence. The city’s congestion, colour, heat, signage, architecture, and movement are not allowed to overwhelm the viewer; they are carefully held within the discipline of the frame.
The strongest image in the installation is arguably the photograph of the damaged high-rise building, positioned near the centre of the exhibition. Its burnt surface interrupts the brightness of the surrounding market scenes and introduces a necessary darkness into the visual sequence. Here, Kayode captures Lagos as a city marked by fragility as much as expansion. The building stands like a wounded monument, a vertical record of neglect, catastrophe, endurance, and unresolved urban history. It is not treated sentimentally. Instead, it becomes a sculptural presence within the series, an image of aftermath that complicates the optimism often attached to narratives of urban growth.
Around this central image, Kayode’s market photographs build a different kind of rhythm. Yellow buses, umbrellas, pedestrians, trading spaces, and compressed architectural surfaces form dense fields of colour and movement. Yet the images are not simply busy. Their strength lies in Kayode’s ability to transform congestion into composition. Umbrellas become chromatic punctuation; buses become repeating signs of circulation; crowds become evidence of collective labour and social choreography. Lagos appears as a city held together by movement, but also by improvisation.
This formal control is one of Kayode’s major achievements. Her photographs are visually rich, but they do not collapse into excess. She uses colour as structure rather than decoration. The yellows of the buses, the pale blue of the sky, the weathered surfaces of buildings, and the scattered umbrellas create an internal visual grammar. The eye moves across the image not randomly, but through carefully organised layers. This is where the work enters the territory of fine art photography most convincingly: the city is not merely seen, it is composed, interpreted, and reimagined.
Kayode’s Lagos is also a city of symbols. The inclusion of public art, monuments, and culturally charged urban sites expands the series beyond the visible mechanics of commerce and transport. These images suggest that the city is shaped not only by economics and infrastructure, but by belief, memory, and collective imagination. In this sense, Èkó Akété is less concerned with recording Lagos than with asking how Lagos sees itself, how it performs itself, and how it remembers itself through space.
The work invites comparison with Akinbode Akinbiyi, whose long engagement with African urban environments has foregrounded walking, attention, rhythm, and the poetics of the street. Like Akinbiyi, Kayode understands the city as something read through accumulation rather than singular spectacle. Yet her approach is more frontal, architectural, and colour-driven. Where Akinbiyi often finds meaning through wandering and quiet observation, Kayode builds meaning through visual compression and symbolic contrast.
There are also resonances with Andrew Esiebo’s sustained interest in Nigerian urban life, architecture, leisure, and social transformation. Both artists recognise the city as a theatre of changing identities. However, Kayode’s emphasis is more meditative and allegorical. Her Lagos is not only a social space; it is a metaphysical one. The photographs suggest that urban form carries emotional and spiritual residue, that buildings and markets can become containers of memory.
The damaged architecture and public spaces within Èkó Akété also recall the work of Guy Tillim, particularly his attention to postcolonial urban environments and the traces of political and historical change embedded in architecture. But where Tillim’s cityscapes often operate through distance, Kayode’s photographs retain warmth and proximity. Her images do not stand apart from Lagos. They move with it. They are attentive to its surfaces, its visual noise, its vulnerability, and its capacity for reinvention.
One might also place Kayode’s work in conversation with Santu Mofokeng’s sensitivity to landscape, memory, and spiritual atmosphere. Although Kayode’s subject is urban rather than pastoral or interior, she shares with Mofokeng a concern for the invisible pressures held within visible space. In her photographs, Lagos becomes more than a built environment. It becomes an emotional terrain, a place where histories continue to press against the present.
What distinguishes Èkó Akété: Fragments of a Living City is its refusal of a single narrative. Lagos is not presented as triumphant, broken, nostalgic, futuristic, sacred, or exhausted. It is all of these things at once. Kayode’s use of the fragment allows her to hold a contradiction without resolving it. Each photograph offers a partial view, but the incompleteness is productive. The viewer is asked to assemble the city mentally, to move between image and image as one might move through Lagos itself: through interruption, density, encounter, obstruction, recognition, and surprise.
The exhibition’s title is therefore exact. These are fragments, but they are not fragments of loss alone. They are fragments of continuity, fragments of pressure, fragments of beauty, fragments of survival. Kayode shows a city continually making and unmaking itself, where a burnt building can sit beside a market in full motion, where public symbols coexist with commercial urgency, and where the past remains active within the present.
If the exhibition has a limitation, it lies in the possibility that its visual sequence could be pushed even further. The relationship between market life, damaged architecture, monuments, and public art is already compelling, but a more deliberate curatorial rhythm could sharpen the emotional arc of the installation. Moving from density to rupture, from rupture to symbol, and from symbol to renewal would allow the exhibition’s conceptual structure to become even more forceful. Still, this does not weaken the work’s overall impact. Rather, it points to the richness of the material and the potential for the series to expand.
As a body of fine art photography, Èkó Akété succeeds because it understands Lagos as both material and metaphor. Kayode’s images are grounded in the recognisable textures of the city, yet they open onto broader questions about memory, urban identity, cultural inheritance, and the human will to continue within unstable environments. Her Lagos is not fixed. It breathes, breaks, rebuilds, remembers, and imagines.
In Èkó Akété: Fragments of a Living City, Funmilayo Kayode offers a deeply considered visual study of a city in constant negotiation with itself. The exhibition confirms her as an artist attentive not only to the surface of place, but to the forces that animate it: labour, belief, damage, beauty, resilience, and collective memory. Lagos emerges not as background, but as protagonist. It is a living archive, a contested monument, and a restless field of becoming.
