[...] the gay, Yoruba-born, artist-photographer Rotimi Fani-Kayode. Rotimi lived and practised most of his adult life outside Africa. He became one of the most significant figures in the explosion of black artistic creativity in the UK in the 1980s, and one of the first to break the silence by bringing male sexuality into the discourses of black representation. He always acknowledged his profound sense of sexual, geographical and familial displacement. His work is a way of both remembering and mourning the losses this represented: mourning his ancestors and their traditions, not by omitting them but by ‘masking’ them, thus giving them a new sensuous but perverse erotic charge. This was his way of honouring their symbolic power in his life and, at the same time, recognizing his own distance from them. In one of his constructed, masked works, as in Yoruba ritual, he sought to exorcize his ancestors by summoning them up but in another register. He always insisted that he was what he was because of, not in spite of, his lost selves. ‘My identity’, he said, ‘has been constructed from my own sense of otherness.’ Identity is never singular but is multiply constructed across intersecting and antagonistic discourses, practices and positions.