African Artists’ Foundation (AAF) has announced that LagosPhoto Festival, Nigeria’s leading international photography festival, will transition to a biennale format. The upcoming 2025 edition will explore the theme ‘Incarceration’, delving into both visible and invisible forms of confinement—ranging from physical imprisonment to intellectual, psychological, and societal restrictions.
As Artistic Director Azu Nwagbogu explains, this edition challenges artists to interrogate and deconstruct the various layers of captivity that define contemporary existence. From outdated mental frameworks to national borders and digital surveillance, LagosPhoto 2025 invites critical visual narratives that imagine pathways to liberation.
The transition to a biennale allows extended time for artists and curators to engage more deeply with the festival’s themes, ensuring a richer and more impactful artistic experience.
Meet the Curatorial Team
LagosPhoto Festival 2025 will be shaped by a dynamic curatorial team bringing fresh voices and perspectives to the festival’s thematic approach:
Kelechi Anabaraonye
A historian whose work focuses on Nigeria’s colonial-era history, Afro-Brazilian architecture, and Lagos’ rich heritage. With over 15 years of research experience, Anabaraonye highlights the legacy of Afro-Brazilian communities through photography and archival research.
Courage Dzidula Kpodo
An architecture graduate and researcher based between Ghana and the US, Kpodo’s work is about shaping the cultural transformations that happen in both built and cultivated spaces. He practices this through a range of expressive and transformative processes including archival research, photographic production, and architectural building.
Amelie Koerbs
A documentary photographer and curator based in between Ghana and Germany whose practice bridges poetic and documentary photography. Her work focuses on global histories of photography, especially in relation to women and Africa. Koerbs honed her curatorial skills in Ghana at Nuku Studio under the mentorship of Nii Obodai and at Robin Beth Inc. under Robin Riskin
Robin Riskin
A curating-artist born in Brooklyn and rooted in Ghana, who uses her position to question, collectivize, and ecologize exhibition-making. Her hybrid practice emerged through the blaxTARLINES Kumasi art community at KNUST, where the artist-teacher karî’kachä seid’ou encouraged artist-students to play all roles across art, curating, and production, so as to transform an infrastructural crisis in Ghana into an opportunity for cultural and conceptual reengineering. Riskin’s alchemical exhibitions and intertextual compositions channel indigenous and ecological knowledge systems through contemporary art contexts, exploring the interconnected qualities of creative processes, and the fluid and fragmented nature of reality and consciousness.
Maria Pia Bernadoni
A contemporary art curator and project facilitator specializing in photography and community-based art initiatives. Since 2015, she has served as an international exhibitions curator for LagosPhoto Festival and the African Artists’ Foundation. Bernardoni has co-curated exhibitions at Bozar Museum (Brussels) and Les Rencontres d’Arles, and has led major cross-cultural projects between Europe and Africa. She is widely recognized as a leading expert in African photography.
Azu Nwagbogu, Artistic Director
Renowned for his curatorial vision that intersects contemporary art and critical discourse, Nwagbogu continues to lead LagosPhoto with a focus on challenging dominant narratives and fostering transformative visual storytelling.
