An Evening with Ayo Akingbade

 

Ayo Akingbade belongs to a generation of young artists who have come of age in cities that promise opportunity while withholding access to it. Growing up in East London – a city where rents rise faster than hopes – she has crafted a filmmaking practice that refuses the idea that working-class Black life is peripheral or supplementary. Instead, she builds films that create space for young people, for emerging artists, for residents of tower blocks and rapidly “renewed” estates, for those who move through a city that can be demeaning, extractive, or indifferent. Her films recognise that art-making is not separate from these conditions; it happens in the cracks, between responsibilities, on the way to work or inside shared flats and precarious leases.

This concern with who gets to speak – and from where – shapes Claudette’s Star (2019), which opens the programme. An homage to Claudette Johnson, a foundational figure of the Black British Arts Movement, the film stages a vital question: how do young people today claim artistic voice within institutions that rarely recognise them? In wandering through Johnson’s exhibition, the young protagonists are not merely viewers. They are trying to understand how someone before them carved out a place where none existed. The film can be read as a soft manifesto for Akingbade’s own position: a young Black artist offering visibility through continuity and care.

Her early film Tower XYZ (2016) situates this care within the lived reality of a generation shaped by austerity, displacement, and the relentless churn of urban “progress”. Young women drift through London’s concrete sprawl, commenting on a city that both forms and fails them. The film captures a truth many recognise: that coming of age in a metropolis means negotiating possibilities that shrink as quickly as they appear. It is an anthem for those who are expected to adapt to each new development yet rarely consulted in its making.

A is for Artist (2018) turns to the fragile beginnings of creative life. Piecing together her father’s archive, a young woman attempts to assemble a self that can dare to make art. Akingbade honours the precarity of this choice – the vulnerability of naming oneself an artist when no one around you holds the power to validate that claim. Her empathy for emerging creatives is palpable: the desire to make something of one’s life, even when life offers little room.

Street 66 (2018) sharpens this into political focus. Chronicling the activism of Dora Boatemah, who fought for the rights of residents on Brixton’s Angell Town Estate, the film foregrounds a lineage of working-class Black women for whom organising was a necessity. Akingbade locates feminist politics in the everyday labour of keeping a community alive: securing housing, resisting displacement, fighting for dignity amid bureaucratic disregard. It is a reminder that the politics of space is always a feminist issue – and that young people inherit the consequences of decisions made long before they could speak.

Even in her lighter works, Akingbade protects the right to pursue artistic curiosity without justification. Hella Trees (2020) follows Rafiki, a young man whose devotion to urban trees becomes a form of resistance. His fascination is tender, unencumbered by racial expectation – a rare depiction of a young Black subject allowed to be eccentric, whimsical, and free. 

With The Fist (2022), she widens her focus to global modernity, observing the rhythms of a factory in Lagos with the same attentiveness she brings to London’s estates. The film stands as a reminder that power, labour, and aspiration are entangled far beyond a single city’s limits.

Taken together, these films form a transgenerational portrait of those who lack institutional power, yet nevertheless shape the city’s rhythms, aesthetics, and future. Akingbade looks closely at the lives that planners, gatekeepers and policymakers overlook, and in doing so, she invites her audience to recognise that change – in a city, in an art world, in a community – is always relational. Her work mirrors the struggle of countless young artists in London, Warsaw, and cities everywhere who are trying to create while trying to stay afloat: working jobs, negotiating visibility, fighting for space that feels like theirs.

[Aleksandra Jeglińska]