Issi Nanabeyin

Straddling the realms of design, architecture and art, Issi Nanabeyin is a genre-defying creative on a mission that is as pedagogical as it is practical – working inside the university and beyond it, carving space for broader perspectives, underrepresented voices and diasporic identities. From his base in East London, Issi creates a broad spectrum of imaginative spaces, objects and artworks that tap into different cultural narratives, speculatively weaving in concepts such as liminality, migration and hybridity, and always striving to apply a lens that is joyful, fun and creative.  

An Architecture Between Cultures, Issi’s graduate project for the Bartlett School of Architecture, where he now teaches, inverted dominant colonial models by reimagining the Scottish Highlands under the African gaze, winning him the Bartlett Architecture Medal and earning him a place in the Wallpaper* round-up of next-generation talents in 2021. This was followed in 2022 by receiving the Samuel Ross Black British Artist Grant and holding his first solo show – Three in the Field at Shoreditch’s FILET gallery, which meditated on the meeting of Black and British identities, and an appearance at the RAA’s Summer Exhibition, where his collaboration with THISS Works, A Resilient Monument, proposed a new, impermanent and organic kind of memorial structure, one which demanded ongoing care from the living to survive. Continuing his passion for critically revisiting historical contexts, Issi works as a researcher at the African Futures Institute.

Having first met Issi at London Design Festival 2021, we’ve loved watching his career evolve and his practice develop. Now, we’re working with Issi as he broadens his scope and ambition still further, with contributions for the British Pavilion at the 2023 Venice Biennale, and the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition and a new sculptural seating design in aluminium, a domestic object that looks beyond Western modes of living.

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