What the 2025 LagosPhoto Biennial Is Doing With Incarceration That You Won’t See Anywhere Else

What happens when the prison has no bars? When captivity wears the face of culture, tradition, architecture, or even memory? The 2025 LagosPhoto Biennial, now operating in a new biennial format, brings these questions into sharp visual focus. It offers layered responses through art that wrestles with systems of control and possibilities for liberation.

Spearheaded by visionary curator Azu Nwagbogu, the inaugural LagosPhoto Biennial explores the theme of “Incarceration.” On view from October 25 to November 29, 2025, the event stretches across four venues in Lagos and Ibadan. It examines the visible and invisible systems that shape how people are confined, surveilled, or spiritually shackled. The shift to a biennial format enables the African Artists’ Foundation (AAF) to deepen its focus, broaden its reach, and slow the pace for more meaningful engagement.

Alia Ali, Tandem, 2024. From the GLITZCH Series. Courtesy of the artist and AAF

The artists featured challenge the idea that incarceration only exists within physical structures. Instead, they confront psychological, ideological, and spiritual cages that operate in silence. Their work invites audiences to confront how these unseen systems limit our choices, dreams, and even our ability to imagine something freer. Ayobami Ogungbe’s woven photographs speak to the emotional residue of displacement. Geremew Tigabu creates ghostly visual landscapes that recall the aftermath of conflict. Meanwhile, Cesar Dezfuli and Stefan Ruiz stretch portraiture into a long-form reflection on migration and carceral structures, revealing quiet defiance in the gaze of each subject.

Geremew Tigabu, Untitled, 2021. From the series Eye of the Storm, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and AAF

Other artists draw on indigenous and spiritual practices to reclaim narrative control. Yagazie Emezi’s work fuses textile, archive, and ritual to channel ancestral memory. Nuotama Bodomo reconstructs film structure using Afro-indigenous rhythms that resist colonial modes of storytelling. Shirin Neshat evokes the haunting presence of state violence beneath illusions of freedom, and Sharbendu De interrogates the psychological toll of climate change through speculative imagery. These methods not only preserve knowledge systems that have long resisted colonial erasure but also offer new forms of visibility rooted in tradition rather than surveillance.

Ayobami Ogungbe, For The Love of God, 2025. Woven photographic print on canvas, 152.4 × 91.4 cm. Courtesy of the artist and AAF

Photography itself becomes the subject. Historically used to catalog, control, and justify imperialism, the camera is turned inside out. Artists unbuild the colonial gaze and replace it with something unflinching, personal, and politically charged. The photographs take an active stance. Rather than simply depicting, they challenge, reinterpret, and disrupt the visual legacies of control embedded in the medium itself.

Massow Ka, Untitled, from Or Blanc, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and AAF

The locations selected for the Biennial deepen its conceptual reach. The African Artists’ Foundation reopens as a key venue, joined by the newly launched Nahous Gallery inside the historic Federal Palace complex. Freedom Park, which once housed Nigeria’s first colonial prison, now serves as a site of reflection and redefinition. In Ibadan, the New Culture Studio, designed by Demas Nwoko in 1970, becomes a platform for examining how cities can imprison or liberate. Each space is chosen not just for its architecture but for the histories that linger in its walls.

The 2025 LagosPhoto Biennial asks viewers to slow down, notice the subtle structures that shape perception and consider how photography can heal the same gaze it once harmed. This is a space where memory and imagination meet through care, clarity, and creative force. The work is rigorous. The emotion is raw. And the invitation is clear. Look again. Then look again, differently.

—

Want more stories like this? Subscribe to Black Art Magazine’s newsletter for deeper dives into the most radical and resonant voices shaping Black art.