WAYS OF SEEING: Art X Lagos 2026
How we see the world is shaped by where we stand, what we carry and what we have learned to recognise. Our insights are influenced by our memories, emotions, our culture and the structures through which we interpret our experiences.
Bringing together five artists from Nigeria, Benin Republic, South Africa and Ethiopia, who work across painting, sculpture and multidisciplinary practices, Ways Of Seeing examines how different approaches to representation, material and subject matter can expand our understanding of ourselves and our surrounding environment.
Each artist's practice offers a range of ways in which we examine our human experience and the forces that shape our understanding of reality. Through explorations of perception, energy, emotion and ideology, the presentation considers how the world might be understood differently when its established boundaries and assumptions are reconsidered.
Each generation and material used differ, however the artists have a shared conviction that the future is made through close attention, through the act of construction. The exhibition allows us to see how each of them offers a method to do this. They all gather 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.
Together, across sculpture, painting, drawing and mixed media, each artist treats the present as unfinished. They approach the world as something that can be examined, experienced and understood from multiple positions. Linsi questions the stability of perception; Abegaz gives visual form to the energies that animate life; Makamo foregrounds the emotional depth of human experience; Bello examines the structures that shape our colective realities; and Adewole considers the possibility of personal transformation through release. Their practices do not offer a single vision of what lies ahead. Instead, they open different points of entry into questions of perception, connection, identity and change. Their works are acts of imagining and ask us to participate in a future still being made.
Ways Of Seeing 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, an opening towards alternative perspectives, relationships and ways of being.
