Ayo Akingbade: Crossing

Exhibition opening: Friday 25 September 2026, 6–9 pm
Löwenbräu Season Opening: Friday 25 September 2026, 6–11 pm

With Crossing, Kunsthalle Zürich presents the first institutional solo exhibition outside the United Kingdom by London-based filmmaker and artist Ayo Akingbade (b. 1994, London). Bringing together two new productions which have their premiere at Kunsthalle Zürich, as well as earlier works by the artist, the exhibition traces the Akingbade’s continued engagement with urbanism and architecture and the social and political forces that shape them.

Over the past decade, Akingbade has realised over twenty short films that move between the genres of experimental documentary, fiction, and personal essay film, presenting them in both art exhibitions and cinema settings. Her works often centre on specific types of architecture and locations – from social housing to shopping centres, factories, and other spaces, public and private alike – which the artist usually captures on celluloid. But Akingbade is less interested in architecture as built form than in how people inhabit these spaces, share them with one another, or navigate their way through them – and, ultimately, how broader social and political changes manifest themselves within those engineered environments shaping the everyday lives of their inhabitants.

Akingbade was born in Hackney in 1994, an area in East London that has witnessed profound urban and social transformation over recent decades, and the questions related to gentrification, housing, and the displacement of local communities were at the centre of many of her earlier works. In her No News Today trilogy, made between 2016 and 2018, for instance, she addressed the use of social housing and the changing living conditions in London. Those themes also recur in Deadphant (2020), a three-minute portrait of the city’s Elephant & Castle Shopping Centre. Shot on Super 8 film during the final weekend before the shopping centre was shuttered, the work depicts both a place and the communities impacted by the impending urban transformation.

The Fist (2022), Akingbade’s earliest work using a 35mm camera, focuses on Nigeria where her family hails from. Filmed at the Guinness brewery in Lagos, this record of a day’s routine inside the factory follows the workers and machines as they carry out their repetitive, finely orchestrated tasks. More recently, Akingbade’s work brought her to Central Europe. In Nichtschwimmer (2026), made during a residency in western Germany near the Belgian and Dutch border, the artist herself appears before the camera as the protagonist. In a historic Art Nouveau swimming pool, built as a public swimming and bathing facility in the early twentieth century – at a time when questions of public health, housing conditions and hygiene were closely intertwined – Akingbade performs simple swimming exercises that, through rhythm and repetition, increasingly resemble choreographed movements.

In Two Truths (2026), a new 35mm work commissioned for the exhibition and filmed in Zurich, Akingbade once more turns to the relationship between body, movement, and architecture. Referencing Trisha Brown’s landmark performance Man Walking Down the Side of a Building (1970), the film takes Brown’s simple yet radical idea of walking vertically down the façade of a building and recasts it in a different context. Different movements, paths, and gazes intersect—or cross—without resolving into a single perspective. Movement thus becomes not only a means of traversing a place, but also a way of bringing different perspectives on it into relation with one another.

Taken together, the works presented in the exhibition trace the idea of movement across different cities, architectures, and cinematic approaches. What connects them is Akingbade’s recurring attention to the relationship between the body and the space it traverses – and the social and political conditions that manifest themselves in the process.