Exploring work in between design, architecture, and art, East London-based Issi Nanabeyin defies genres. He searches within the university and beyond, carving space for larger perspectives, underrepresented voices, and diasporic identities. Issi digs deep to create spaces, objects, and artworks that tap into cultural narratives through the concepts of liminality, migration, and hybridity ? while also always striving to apply a lens that is joyful, fun, and creative.
“The first time I saw the work of Austrian sculptor Walter Pichler was the first moment I saw how an architectural lens can be used to create work that danced between sculpture art and design,” Issi shared. “One of Pichler’s first works was a collaboration with Hans Hollein, whom together wanted to “liberate” architecture from the constraints of building in the 1960s and to detach sculpture from the constraints of abstraction. I saw similarities in how I wanted to detach the idea of architecture from both the idea of ?building? but ideas of ?white?.” Issi Nanabeyin
An Architecture Between Cultures is Issi?s graduate project for the Bartlett School of Architecture, where he now teaches. Within it he 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 Wallpaper*s roundup of next-generation talents in 2021. This was followed in 2022 with the Samuel Ross Black B...