Under the artistic direction of Azu Nwagbogu, founder of the African Artists’ Foundation, the 2025 biennial explores the theme ‘Incarceration’, delving into the visible and hidden dimensions of captivity that manifest across personal, political, and collective life.
On View: October 25 – November 29, 2025
September 17, 2025 (Lagos and Ibadan, Nigeria) – After fifteen years of championing photography as a platform for exchange and critical reflection, the African Artists’ Foundation (AAF) is proud to announce that LagosPhoto Festival will now take place in a biennial format, on view from October 25 – November 29, 2025.
This new chapter signals LagosPhoto’s growth in providing an expanded space for deeper reflection, diverse programming, and wider impact. Under the theme of ‘Incarceration’, the 2025 biennial will explore the many forms–imposed by the self or by others–that continue to threaten subjugated peoples in their efforts to shape their futures and consider how images can serve as tools for enacting, cracking, and reimagining carceral systems. The programming expands across three venues in Lagos and Ibadan, showcasing solo presentations, artists’ collaborations, institutional exhibitions, screenings and talks. LagosPhoto’s first expansion to Ibadan will showcase works that engage with the city’s urban and architectural dimensions of incarceration.
Manifested in many forms, incarceration may not be instantly apparent. The global carceral system is built on institutions and policies justified by reformist ideals and the management of society’s perceived ills. But the less apparent dimensions of incarceration include psychological, ideological and spiritual cages, which are powerful and deeply rooted precisely because they do not need walls to confine. They entangle the soul, conditioning dreams, choices, and the very imaginations of freedom. These abstract forms of confinement—quiet, enduring, and often internalized—are what make the carceral condition so insidious.
The carceral system relies on processes that surveil, police, and classify. Rendering visibility is inherent to these processes, and throughout history, photography, as a technical medium in its purported objectivity, has been deployed to serve that purpose. Photography and lens-based media played a pejorative role in conquest, creating the visual propaganda that documented, justified, and sustained the colonial project. Yet photography has also played a crucial role in many resistance and emancipatory efforts. It has documented moments of social and political liberation, from jubilant celebrations surrounding independence declarations, to the architectural visions of newly sovereign states, and to immortalizing the joys of daily life. It has also enacted movements of aesthetic and technological liberation, from propelling modern reimagining of painting, and enabling the abstraction of reality, to rendering time inside the picture plane. In these acts, photography becomes a tool of empowerment, challenging systems of control, breaking bounds of perception and composition, and reclaiming narratives and visibility on one’s own terms.
LagosPhoto continues AAF’s exploration of the scope of photography, embracing media forms and apparatuses beyond the limits of a camera’s frame and cycles. Artists’ work spans figurative, abstract, scenic, and still-life genres; manifests through printed, sculptural, woven, dyed, and performative forms; engages media including image, film, sound, text, installation, and archival material; and employs manual, digital, terrestrial, and ancestral technologies. Works on show test photography as a device for dialectical freedom and control, and image-making both within and beyond colonial constructs of the camera.
Selected works probe the afterlives of trauma and deterritorialization, between personal memory and collective dislocation: Ayobami Ogungbe’s woven series imagines the emotional textures of displacement, while Geremew Tibagu renders ghostly landscapes shaped by conflict and its aftermath. On another note, Cesar Dezfuli and Stefan Ruiz trace how their subjects navigate carceral and border systems through portraits that expand the scope and temporality of ethnographic traditions. Additionally, artists like Yagazie Emezi and Nuotama Bodomo rework ethnographic traditions through indigenous crafts and knowledge: Emezi’s spiritually guided practice invokes ancestral memory through, textiles, archives and ritual; while Bodomo’s work in film dismantles colonial story forms through Afro‑indigenous rhythms and compositions. Other artists reflect on psychological and ecological devastation, from Shirin Neshat’s melody of haunting violence within states of apparent freedom, to Sharbendu De’s speculations on futures of climate crisis.
As the first edition in a newly established biennial format, this year’s LagosPhoto marks the beginning of a transformative and experimental chapter—one that builds on the festival’s 15-year legacy whilst forging fresh dialogues and directions on invention, resistance and freedom. This slower format consists of open-call selections and a curated core, with special focus on archival engagements, intertextual interpretations, and research-based collections. Selected proposals span the African continent, its diaspora and global affinities, while maintaining a strong core in Anglophone, Francophone, indigenous, and translocal West Africa. Projects address critical issues of ecology, migration, identity, religion, and architecture, and excavate literary, luminous and literal prison systems.
This year’s edition also activates historical spaces with a cultural impetus. Macro- and micro-exhibitions are networked between historic sites of gathering, exchange, opening and containment, where works dialogue with the historic shifts of the spaces they inhabit. In Lagos, the curated core projects are distributed across three parallel venues: the African Artists’ Foundation (AAF) space, reopening after two years of closure; the nearby Nahous Gallery, newly opened within the historic Federal Palace complex (a key venue for the FESTAC celebrations of 1977, and where Nigeria’s Declaration of Independence was signed in 1960); and Freedom Park, situated on the grounds of country’s first colonial prison, repurposed as a civic common.
As the Biennial’s footprint extends beyond Lagos to include Ibadan—an historic center and capital of Oyo State—the New Culture Studio designed by Demas Nwoko in 1970 is activated for works that explore the urban and architectural dimensions of incarceration. Additional spaces activated as satellite venues for this year’s edition include Freedom Park, Didi Museum, Nahous Gallery, and Alliance Francaise de Lagos.
LagosPhoto 25 is sponsored by the Ministry of Art and Tourism, National Geographic, Canon, Open Society Foundations, and Nahous Gallery. LagosPhoto 25 is carried out with support from local creative houses Kòbọmọjẹ́ Artist Residency (K-AiR), Madhouse, and Wunika Mukan Gallery.
NOTES TO EDITORS:
About African Artists’ Foundation (AAF):
African Artists’ Foundation (AAF), founded in 2007 in Lagos, Nigeria, is a decentralized, multivalent, metamorphic art space that embraces community values and experimental artistic principles. AAF supports boundary-breaking artistic ideas and promotes social justice issues, ecology, and community initiatives by empowering creative expression. The foundation fosters a deeper understanding and appreciation of contemporary art, design, and culture through residencies, workshops, exhibitions, and educational programs.
About LagosPhoto:
Launched in 2010, LagosPhoto is the first international arts festival of photography in Nigeria. The festival includes exhibitions, workshops, artist presentations, discussions, and large-scale outdoor prints displayed throughout Lagos. LagosPhoto aims to establish a community for contemporary photography, uniting local and international artists through images that encapsulate individual experiences and identities from across Africa. The festival educates about photography as it explores historical and contemporary issues, shares cultural practices, and promotes social programs.
https://www.lagosphotofestival.com/
The 2025 edition of the LagosPhoto Biennial is supported by:
Image Credits:
1. Geremew Tigabu, Push Pull. Addis Ababa, 2021. From the series Eye of the Storm, 2023. Courtesy of the artist, AAF and LagosPhoto.
2. Ayobami Ogunge, For the Love of God, 2025. Woven photographic prints on canvas, 152.4 × 91.4 cm. Courtesy of the artist, AAF and LagosPhoto.