HEAVY IS THE HEAD: Solo Show by Sanjo Lawal

Heavy is the Head brings together seventeen previously unseen works, produced between 2022 and 2025, marking Sanjo Lawal’s first international solo exhibition. The series unfolds at a decisive moment in contemporary African photography, in which the mobile phone emerges not merely as a technical instrument, but as a vehicle for aesthetic and political emancipation.

Since the nineteenth century, the culture of the photographic studio in Lagos, Bamako, Accra or Dakar has played a crucial role in shaping African visual identities. For decades, the portraits produced there became spaces of self-inscription and projection, territories of negotiation between tradition and modernity, between memory and the future. Sanjo Lawal is a direct heir to this lineage, yet he radically reconfigures it: the studio is no longer bound to a physical space, but to portability; the camera is no longer cumbersome and distant, but quotidian, intimate, and accessible — the mobile phone.

By choosing it as his primary tool, Lawal subverts entrenched hierarchies in the history of photography, freeing himself from dependence on expensive equipment and from the technical conventions of the Eurocentric canon. In doing so, he democratizes the act of seeing, for at the core of his practice lies the possibility for each subject — artist or sitter — to appropriate the image as an act of sovereignty.

Saturated backgrounds and vibrant compositions lend Heavy is the Head a remarkable chromatic monumentality. This is a series in which digital manipulation, far from mere artifice, expands the visible into a visionary and Afrofuturist dimension, while the theatricality of the pose transforms each model into a mythical figure. The fila and the gele — Yorùbá symbols of prestige and royalty — emerge here as contemporary crowns, restoring to the sitters the dignity of being seen as bearers of history, memory, and sovereignty.

Sanjo Lawal summons fashion not as ornament, but as ritual. In his portraits, clothing and pose transcend the ephemeral to become a visual grammar of identity. It is precisely at this intersection — between fashion and tradition, digital manipulation and studio culture, the mobile phone and African visual heritage — that the originality of his practice is revealed.

Heavy is the Head thus asserts itself as an inaugural and necessary gesture, consecrating Sanjo Lawal’s inscription within a new generation of creators who, by appropriating the most quotidian of technological devices, radically reconfigure the African visual narrative, situating it within the global stage without relinquishing its historical, symbolic, and ritual density.