ART X LAGOS 2026: A WORLD YET POSSIBLE
A New Chapter, A New Decade
A World Yet Possible begins from the premise that the future exists as an invitation to take stock. Affirming that our futures are made, imagined, drawn, modelled and argued into being, and artists have always been among its earlier architects.
Bringing together five artists from Nigeria, Benin Republic, South Africa and Ethiopia, the exhibition allows us to see how each offer a method to do this. It gathers a set of propositions, each grounded in a distinct way of seeing, and each insisting that possibility begins with attention. Attention to the body, to the child, to the surface, to the unseen structures that shape how we live together.
In the figurative sculptures of Adeniyi Adewole, the body becomes a vessel where memory and instinct meet. Drawing on Yoruba philosophy,he models in clay and casts in fibreglass, then includes colour on his forms, often using airbrush. The titles of his works speak of tenderness, guardianship and germination. They treat the human and animal figures as a vessel for what must be protected and what’s to grow.
Moufouli Bello turns her attention to the invisible scaffolding of belief. Moving across painting, installation, sound and animation, she asks how religion, politics and technology condition what we feel and how we imagine solidarity, which are the first questions anyone must ask before rebuilding a shared world. Her piece, “Nobody’s Mad At You Tayô”reads as an intimate speech, a gesture of reassurance. These paintings refer to the personal scale at which systems are felt, and where they may be unlearned.
Nelson Makamo locates the future in the African child’s gaze. His portraits draw on the laughter outside his window and the rhythm of Johannesburg’s taxis, which both hold joy and stillness. His selected works made across silkscreen, watercolour, acrylic and mixed media, show the range of practice that moves fluidly between processes. The works are all Untitled, as he declines to fix his subjects in one single story. They carry stillness, laughter and rhythm of lived environments, and they remind of the world yet possible will be inherited, and reshaped by those looking back at us from the paper..
Nuru Abegaz approaches possibility through material invention. He built his visual language from limitations, his “Grey Period” of black and white. His “drawing with nastro” transforms electrical tape into a language of rhythm and vibration, so that restraint, whether a limited palette or a deliberately blank surface, becomes a generative force.
Roshan Linsi’s practice moves between performance, installation and painting, works at the edge of perception itself. Her paintings balance the micro and the macro and test the ambiguity of boundaries, suggesting that new worlds may begin where old distinctions loosen.
Across sculpture, painting, drawing and mixed media, each artist treats the present as unfinished. Their works are acts of imagining and ask us to participate in a future still being made.
A World Yet Possible is offered in that spirit. As ART X Lagos opens a new chapter and a new decade, the exhibition invites viewers to stand in the space between what is and what could be, and to recognise that the act of looking carefully is already a way of beginning.
