ZURICH.- 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 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.





List of Works

1 Two Truths, 2026
35mm transferred to HD, colour, sound, 4:53 min
Switzerland / United Kingdom
Courtesy Ayo Akingbade

Shot on 35mm in Zurich, Two Truths takes as a starting point Trisha Brown’s performance Man Walking Down the Side of a Building from 1970, in which a performer walked vertically down the façade of a building in New York. This radical reduction of choreography and movement brought the simple act of walking into focus by placing it in an unnatural situation.

In Two Truths, Akingbade cites the movement sequences of Brown’s iconic performance and translates them into an encounter between two women set in present-day Zurich. One of them, played by Akingbade herself, strolls through the city to eventually come across a person descending backwards down the façade of a car park. Two distinct axes of movement and lines of sight—one horizontal, along the street, the other vertical, along the building—emerge and intersect over the course of the film.

While Trisha Brown’s work shifted architecture from a static backdrop into an active gravitational field, Akingbade extends its parameters to include not only the body but also its perception. Akingbade is both protagonist and observer, and her gaze is joined by those of other passers-by, the performer, and the camera itself. Movement and gaze follow different paths through space, meeting and crossing without resolving into a single perspective. The title, Two Truths, signals that a single event can give rise to different, concurrent perspectives, or perhaps truths.

The work is set in Zurich-West, a former industrial district that has undergone profound transformation in recent decades. The filming location neighbours the Toni-Areal, a former dairy production complex that is now home to the Zurich University of the Arts as well as the Kunsthalle Zürich.

2 The Fist, 2022
35mm transferred to HD, colour, sound, 23:40 min
Nigeria / United Kingdom
Courtesy Ayo Akingbade & LUX, London

The Fist (2022) follows a working day at the Guinness brewery in the Ikeja Industrial Estate in Lagos and is Akingbade’s first film made in Nigeria. Opened in 1962, two years after the country gained independence from Britain, the factory was the company’s first production outpost outside Ireland and the United Kingdom. Guinness beer has been exported to West Africa since the nineteenth century, and the brewery’s history is closely connected to Nigeria’s colonial past and its economic entanglements.

The quiet, mostly static 35mm shots capture the workers and the everyday routines inside the massive facility. The camera follows the different stages of production, the machinery, the conveyor and packaging lines, and the repeated gestures of the staff. Bottles move through the rooms in endless rows at the pace dictated by the machines whose noise dominates the film’s soundscape. The Fist develops its own rhythm from these repetitive sequences of movement in which human and mechanical motions continuously intersect.

Akingbade approaches the political and economic conditions of the site through the close observation of a single working day. The factory in The Fist appears not merely as a setting, but as an architecture that organises labour and determines its rhythms and routines.

3 Deadphant, 2020
Super 8mm transferred to HD, colour, sound, 3:03 min
United Kingdom
Courtesy Ayo Akingbade & LUX, London

Deadphant (2020) was shot during the final weekend before the permanent closure of South London’s Elephant & Castle Shopping Centre shuttered in September 2020. Built over six decades ago as part of the reconstruction effort of an area heavily damaged during the Second World War, the complex was considered one of Europe’s first covered shopping centres when it opened in 1965. Over the following decades, it developed into a highly popular meeting place housing numerous independent businesses, particularly serving the area’s migrant communities.

With a handheld Super 8 camera, Akingbade meanders through the building’s arcades and shops moments before their ultimate closure. Deadphant is one of the very few works in which the artist operates the camera herself, thus making her own movement through the space an immediate part of the film. In brief, fragmentary shots, she records customers, displays, signs, and incidental details, creating an intimate portrait of the place in its final days.

The closure and the subsequent demolition of the shopping centre are also linked to urban transformation and gentrification—processes that Akingbade explores in many of her works. In Deadphant, however, she directs her gaze not towards the planned future of the site, but towards what is in the process of disappearing: an everyday space of commerce and community life and the people who inhabited it over decades.

4 Nichtschwimmer, 2026
Super 16mm transferred to HD, colour, sound, 5:19 min
Germany / United Kingdom
Courtesy Ayo Akingbade

Shot on 16mm film, Nichtschwimmer (2026) is set inside the Elisabethhalle in Aachen, Germany, an Art Nouveau swimming and bathing facility built between 1908 and 1911 which remains in operation to this day. Alone in the pool, the artist repeats a series of simple exercises: she holds onto the edge, pushes herself away, swims short distances, and begins again. Against the elaborate architecture of the baths, with its marble surfaces, columns, sculptures, and ornamental details, Akingbade’s body and its movement through space come to the fore. Through repetition and rhythm, these seemingly ordinary swimming exercises take on performative character.

The title Nichtschwimmer—literally “non-swimmer”—refers to the pool’s area designated for beginners. Here, learning to swim becomes a process of negotiating the relationship between one’s own body and its surroundings: the architecture of the pool sets the parameters within which movement is practised, repeated, and gradually acquired.

The work is the result of a residency programme in Aachen, Germany, during which Akingbade regularly visited the swimming pool to learn how to swim. Towards the end of her stay, she returned to the site with a camera and made this experience the point of departure for her film.