Issi Nanabeyin

Issi Nanabeyin, born in 1995, is a multidisciplinary artist and designer trained in architecture. He was raised in East London and is based there. His work builds diasporic identities into forms — often digital ones — into images, text and spatial interventions.

His practice is a refusal to accept architecture as singular or static. It brings together his own architectural, ancestral and digital narratives, breaching the binaries of cultural separation to form architectural reimaginations for the contemporary diaspora. He examines narratives of liminality, migration and hybridity, drawing on cultural, critical and race studies, and carries those narratives into the territory of architecture. He sums up the starting point as: "How to live out your imagination, not just your History."

He is a graduate of the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London: BSc Architecture in 2016, MArch with distinction in 2020. He is a researcher for the African Futures Institute and a design tutor on the BSc Architecture programme at the Bartlett. He is a recipient of the Black British Artist Grant and an artist of the London Creative Network. He won the Crossroads Prize at the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism 2021, the Bartlett Architecture Medal (2020) and the Narinder Sagoo Drawing Prize (2015).

Drawing is at the centre of the work: graphite, charcoal and sumi ink on cartridge paper, sometimes mounted on painted plyboard, sometimes held in aluminium and steel frames. In Bordeaux, the exhibition Élémentaire, presented by Artlee at the Galerie du Petit Atelier in April 2022, took the form of a ninety-six-hour performance: the public watched the artist draw, cut, paint and search. The drawings there sit between Le Corbusier's Modulor, an anthropometric scale of proportions, and the principles of sub-Saharan wood sculpture — "building a language using two different alphabets," as he puts it, which is why hands or feet are sometimes at a different scale from the rest of the body.

In 2024, Zone Trois Galerie presented his solo exhibition Here by Dragons, from 18 April to 14 June. The title takes up the cartographers' formula, who filled unexplored territories with illustrations of dragons: wherever there was the unknown, myths appeared to explain it. The exhibition is not literally about dragons but about us, "as beings at once mythical and real, shaped by our histories and our realities." It brought together some fifteen drawings, from "Freaks of the First Mythologies" (204 × 137 cm) to small aluminium-framed pieces.

His other exhibitions include Three in the Field, a solo exhibition at Filet Gallery in London (2022), the RA Summer Exhibition (2022) and A Memory of Architecture, a group exhibition curated by Brenna Horrox and David Lisbon (2022). Issi Nanabeyin also handles the creative direction of Zone Trois Galerie, from Studio Oddities in London.