Passage—a song

What happens when we listen to photographs instead of simply looking? And what stories emerge when images carry the quiet echoes of memory, history, and everyday life? 

The traveling exhibition, Passage—a song, brings together the work of two Berlin-based artists - Akinbode Akinbiyi (UK/Nigeria) and Abrie Fourie (South Africa). It explores the connections between photography, sound, and political imagination and was developed during a joint residency in Burkina Faso, West Africa, in 2021. The body of work emerged from the photographers’ movements in the streets of the capital Ouagadougou and the surrounding landscapes of Oubritenga Province during a period of growing political uncertainty in the country.

Sharing an interest in place, memory, and listening, Akinbiyi and Fourie work independently yet in conversation with one another to capture the visual and acoustic landscapes they find themselves in. They slowly move through streets, markets, public spaces, and peripheral zones, capturing the everyday rhythms that shape the environments they pass through. Their photographs turn to the quieter details to everyday life, searching for traces of cultural memory, the enduring legacy of the revolutionary leader, Thomas Sankara, and collective histories that continue to resonate today.

The photographic works are in dialogue with a sound installation, echoing field recordings in Burkina Faso, and recordings from archival music collections in Ouagadougou. Visitors are invited to navigate the space much as the artists navigated the landscapes of Burkina Faso - through walking, observing, and listening.

Abrie Fourie 

Abrie Fourie (b. 1969, Pretoria, South Africa) is an artist, curator, educator, and publisher living and working between Berlin, Germany, and Richmond, South Africa. Working across photography, sound, walking, and artist publications, his practice explores the relationship between landscape, memory, listening, and the social and political histories embedded in place. After studying Fine Arts at the Tshwane University of Technology and Curatorship through the Africus Institute in Johannesburg, Fourie taught photography and curatorial studies in Pretoria from 1993 to 2007. In 2005, he co-founded Modern Art

Projects South Africa (MAPSA), an independent contemporary art organisation and residency programme based in Richmond, Northern Cape.

For more than three decades, Fourie has exhibited internationally, with solo exhibitions at institutions including the Museum for African Art, New York; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Johannesburg Art Gallery; Iwalewahaus, University of Bayreuth; and Galerie Wedding, Berlin. His work has been included in major international exhibitions such as documenta 14, the Bamako Biennale of Photography, the Hamburg Triennial of Photography, and, most recently, The Tirailleur, Trials and Tribulations (2026), curated by Paz Guevara and Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin.

Recent projects combine photography, sound, walking, and archival research to explore the resonances between landscape, memory, and belonging. His publications include Oblique (2011), Passage—a song. (2023, with Akinbode Akinbiyi), and Seeing with a Listening Ear—Layers of Feedback (2025). Through these interconnected practices, Fourie investigates how landscapes become repositories of memory and how attentive listening can reveal histories that lie beyond the visible image.

Akinbode Akinbiyi 

Akinbode Akinbiyi (b. 1946, Oxford, England) is a Nigerian-British photographer, curator, and writer based in Berlin. For nearly five decades, he has developed a distinctive photographic practice rooted in walking, wandering, and attentive observation. Working primarily in African cities, he explores the rhythms, encounters, and layered histories embedded in everyday urban life.

After studying English Literature at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, Akinbiyi began working as a freelance photographer in 1977. Since then, he has travelled extensively across Africa and beyond, photographing cities such as Lagos, Cairo, Lubumbashi, Johannesburg, Ouagadougou, Khartoum, Dakar, Bamako, São Paulo, and Chicago. His work is characterised by an open-ended engagement with place, revealing the social, cultural, and poetic dimensions of contemporary urban life.

Akinbiyi’s work has been presented internationally at institutions and exhibitions including documenta 14 (Athens and Kassel), the Chicago Architecture Biennial, MoMA New York, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlinische Galerie, the Sharjah Biennial, and, most recently, Minor Keys at the 61st Venice Biennale. His photographs are held in major public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Berlinische Galerie, and the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi.

Throughout his practice, Akinbiyi approaches photography as a process of encounter—an act of looking, listening, and moving through the world. His images invite viewers to slow down and attend to the subtle gestures, relationships, and stories that shape everyday life. Recent publications include Passage—a song. (2023, with Abrie Fourie), Being, Seeing, Wandering (2024), Sometimes to be Lost Is to Be Found and to Be Found Is to Be Lost Anew (2024), and The Swiss Embassy in Berlin and Its Surroundings: A Building by Diener & Diener (2026), publications that further reflect his enduring engagement with the poetics of place, movement, and observation.