Yinka Shonibare CBE RA features in 'The Future is Blinking: Early Studio Photography from West and Central Africa'

'The Future is Blinking' is the first exhibition to focus on the work of the earliest photographers working in West and Central Africa. Towards the end of the 19th century, together with their clients, they began to produce captivating images in outdoor studios. Future viewers of their images were always kept in mind; the sitters posed as they wanted to be seen by posterity. These images are remarkably different from the work of colonial photographers whose work served to confirm the Other as backward and exotic.

Featuring around one hundred original prints, the exhibition considers the key themes in the history of photography in West and Central Africa with a focus on its peculiarities and its connections with other local art forms.

The title of the exhibition is taken from Tobias Wendl’s 1997 film 'Future Remembrance'. In it, Ghanaian photographer Philip Kwame Apagya refers to what he sees as the main function of photography in Ghana: the creation of idealised portraits to be seen and remembered by future generations.