LagosPhoto Biennial 2025 Marks a New Era of African Visual Storytelling

For fifteen years LagosPhoto has been the beating heart of contemporary photography in West Africa. Now, under the stewardship of Azu Nwagbogu and the African Artists Foundation, the festival enters a bold new chapter. Reborn as a biennial, the inaugural edition arrives this autumn, running from 25 October to 29 November across Lagos and Ibadan, and carries a theme that feels urgent, provocative and deeply human — incarceration.

The choice is striking. At first glance, incarceration summons images of bars, chains and courtrooms, yet the biennial pushes us further. It asks us to consider captivity in its many guises, both visible and invisible. Political systems that police identity. Social hierarchies that cage ambition. Psychological walls that silence creativity. Spiritual burdens that confine imagination. These are the prisons without gates, and LagosPhoto intends to place them squarely under the lens.

Photography itself sits at the centre of this interrogation. History reminds us that the camera has been a double agent — a tool of domination during colonial conquest, recording and categorising, but also a weapon of resistance. Through jubilant images of independence, the everyday poetry of street life and the radical experiments of modernist painters reimagining the frame, photography has long carried the dual capacity to oppress and to liberate. The biennial asks what happens when the same medium that once served the coloniser is reclaimed to tell new stories of resilience, defiance and freedom.

The line-up is ambitious. In Lagos, exhibitions will unfold across three resonant venues. The African Artists Foundation reopens its doors after two years, signalling a renewed cultural pulse. The Nahous Gallery takes its place inside the historic Federal Palace complex, once a stage for Nigeria’s independence. Freedom Park, formerly a colonial prison, provides a setting of almost cinematic symbolism, where works converse with the ghosts of confinement and the hope of civic space. In Ibadan, the New Culture Studio designed by Demas Nwoko hosts works that map the city’s architectural and urban relationship to captivity. The expansion into Ibadan underscores LagosPhoto’s ambition to extend its impact beyond the commercial capital into spaces equally steeped in cultural memory.

The artists selected reflect the scale of the biennial’s vision. Ayobami Ogungbe weaves displacement into tactile form, offering fabric as a vessel of memory. Geremew Tigabu sketches spectral landscapes shaped by conflict. Cesar Dezfuli and Stefan Ruiz examine the borders and bureaucracies that shape lives, their portraits giving quiet dignity to subjects negotiating hostile systems. Yagazie Emezi draws on ancestral craft and ritual, folding archives into textile and spirit, while filmmaker Nuotama Bodomo disrupts colonial storytelling with Afro-indigenous rhythms that insist on new narrative structures. The spectrum runs from Shirin Neshat’s meditations on violence hidden within supposed freedom to Sharbendu De’s speculative imaginings of climate futures. Together these voices complicate the idea of imprisonment, showing how bodies, minds and even ecosystems carry its imprint.

This inaugural biennial also slows the rhythm, inviting reflection. The format blends open call projects with a tightly curated core, creating a dialogue between archival excavations, intertextual readings and research-led exhibitions. It is a space where photography dissolves into sculpture, textiles, sound, installation and performance, constantly testing the boundaries of what the medium can hold.

Sponsors including the Ministry of Art and Tourism, National Geographic, Canon, Open Society Foundations and Nahous Gallery anchor the endeavour, alongside local creative forces such as Kobọmojẹ́ Artist Residency, Madhouse and Wunika Mukan Gallery. Their support underlines the growing recognition that LagosPhoto is no longer just a festival but a platform shaping the cultural and intellectual conversations of our time.

The inaugural LagosPhoto Biennial is more than an exhibition. It is a staging ground for questions that matter — who gets to tell stories, who defines freedom, and how art can prise open the cages both seen and unseen. For those who witness it, whether in Lagos, Ibadan or through the conversations it sparks worldwide, this edition promises to leave a lasting impression.