Wandering With Your Eyes

Join us to learn from a master of photography with 50 years of experience what it means to look carefully and how to make photographs out of this care: SAVVY Contemporary´s Colonial Neighbours archive invites the photographer and artist Akinbode Akinbiyi for a workshop within our Wedding Affairs neighbourhood programme. Colonial Neighbours is interested in finding forms of activating an archive and its continuations via collective gatherings where non-hierarchical forms of interventions could be developed together. As a surprise guest, Akinbode will be join by his long-time friend, storyteller and documentary photographer Babajide Adeniyi-Jones. 

After an inner garden party, a colour grading experience, language based experiments and a series of intimate exchanges, we now turn to photography for an afternoon to collectively listen and learn from embodied archives. In an informal get together, Akinbode Akinbiyi will share his own path of listening to his surroundings, capturing images and visions of his lifetime not only in his art but in their embodiment into practice. The afternoon is dedicated to all those who are interested in photography at large, the art of wandering and storytelling as a tool of intervention.

Akinbode Akinbiyiwas born 1946 in Oxford, England. He studied English linguistics at the University of Ibadan and studies of German Linguistics in Heidelberg. He works as a freelance photographer since 1977. In 1987, he was granted the STERN Fellowship for Journalists in Lagos, Kano, and Dakar. In 1993, he co-founded UMZANZSI, a cultural center in the Clermont Township in Durban, South Africa. He was also a co-initiator and mentor at the Centres of Learning for Photography in Africa organized by the Goethe-Institut Nigeria as well as a co-curator of the Bamako Biennale for Photography in 2001, 2003, 2019, and 2022. Akinbiyi lives and works in Berlin.

Akinbode Akinbiyi runs workshops around the world, passing on his knowledge of photographic practice. From 2008 until 2018 he joined Simon Njami, Mark Sealy, Bisi Silva and others to teach the Photographers’ Masterclass in a number of African countries, attended by more than fifty young artists from Africa, among them Mimi Cherono Ng’ok, Lebohang Kganye and Thabiso Sekgala.

Exhibitions of the artist’s work include: New Photography 2023, MoMA, New York, 2023 (G); Triennial of Photography Hamburg, 2022 (G); Six Songs, Swirling Gracefully in the Taut Air, Gropius Bau, Berlin, 2020 (S); The Faculty of Sensing. Thinking With, Through, and by Anton Wilhelm Amo, Kunstverein Braunschweig, 2020 (G); Paranoia TV, steirischer herbst, Graz, 2020 (G); Learning from Athens, documenta 14, 2017 (G); THAT, AROUND WHICH THE UNIVERSE REVOLVES: ON RHYTHMANALYSIS OF MEMORY, TIMES, BODIES IN SPACE, SAVVVY Contemporary, 2017 (G); Three Photographers/Six Cities, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2016 (G); Adama in Wonderland, Goethe-Institut Johannesburg, 2013/14 (G); DakÁrt, Dakar, 2009 (G); Tales from a Globalizing World, in Brussels, Dhaka, Geneva and Cairo, among others; 2003–2007 (G); Africa Remix, Düsseldorf, London, Paris, Tokyo, Stockholm and Johannesburg, 2004–2007 (G); Sea Never Dry, Museum für Völkerkunde Dresden, 2005 (G)

Babajide Adeniyi-Joneswas born in Lagos, Nigeria. He has worked as a professional photographer in Europe, Africa and the United States since 1974, with a practice that includes documentary, industrial and editorial photography.