A forthcoming exhibition in Lagos regroups LIMCAF’s top winners—not to reminisce, but to show what their art has become beyond the glare of victory. Okechukwu Uwaezuoke writes
As an exhibition’s title, LEGACY trembles under the weight of expectation. As a word, it can scarcely contain the storm gathering around the exhibition that opens on Saturday, September 20, at 1952 Africa Gallery. Hidden in plain sight on Abeke Animashaun Street in Lekki Phase I, Lagos, this modest space is about to detonate into something far larger than its walls.
What promises to unfold here will not be a glossy soirée where champagne eclipses canvases and hashtags outshine brushstrokes. No, LEGACY is no such confection. It arrives instead as declaration and defiance: a vow to speak on one’s own terms, a refusal to be muffled by trends or patrons. It is art that bares its fangs, unsheathes its claws, and demands to be seen.
At once celebration and reckoning, the exhibition summons back past winners of the Life In My City Art Festival (LIMCAF). Once, they were young victors clutching cheques in Enugu, their futures radiant with possibility. Now, they return seasoned by survival, persistence, and the refusal to pander to whims. The question they pose—without quite saying it—hangs in the air like a charge: what becomes of a prize when the applause has faded?
“This exhibition brings together the best of Nigeria’s young artists since the inception of LIMCAF in 2007,” the festival’s art director, Dr Ayo Adewunmi affirms. “With almost 60 works, the exhibition captures the vision of LIMCAF to promote art as a tool for youth empowerment and national development.”
To pigeonhole this, therefore, as an alumni showcase would be absurd—akin to calling Lagos traffic a “mild inconvenience.” This is Nigeria refracted through thread, wire, tesserae, and scorched wood. A visitor feels it before crossing the threshold: the pressure of unfinished arguments, forms stirring for another round.
The names of the exhibiting artists alone read like a roll of honour: Abiodun Emmanuel, Adebayo Ebenezer Seun, Chibuike Ifedilichukwu, Chichetam Okoronta, Edward Samuel, Ejiofor Samson, Eweje Emmanuel, Eze Mariagoretti Chinenye, Ezichi Nkwocha, Ibrahim Afegbu, Idowu Abayomi, Ijiko Kelvin, Izuchukwu Muoneme, Klaranze Okhide, Lucky Ezah, Mayi Theophilus, Mbaeri Stephen, Motorola John, Ngozi-Omeje Ezema, Nnamdi Udoka, Okechukwu Eze, Olayemi Sunday Opeyemi, Onyinye Ezennia, Priscilla Oryina, Paul Emenike, Popoola Nurudeen, Segun Victor Owolabi, and Shade Fagorusi. Each once a LIMCAF laureate. Each now testing what it means to create in the long shadow of acclaim.
Take Adebayo Ebenezer Seun. A restless shape-shifter, he slips every convenient label. He speed-paints, he performs, he convenes public forums where art wrestles openly with democracy and justice. LIMCAF’s top prize in 2023, Dak’Art in 2024, TEDx stages, collaborations with UNICEF, UNDP, Yiaga Africa—the résumé rattles like a drum. Yet the measure is not credentials but urgency. His canvases do not hang—they agitate. His performances do not soothe—they provoke. To encounter them is to be dragged into the undertow of a protest march: colour pounding where slogans might be, brushstrokes rising louder than megaphones.
Elsewhere the register dips, but the tension coils tighter. Segun Victor Owolabi stitches portraits from thread with such precision that, at first glance, they appear to be oils. Step closer and the secret reveals itself: myriads of loops, interlaced into faces on the verge of blinking. Fragility is his weapon. Thread is his metaphor: resilience spooled taut, always one tug away from collapse. His portraits hover between permanence and undoing, daring the viewer to imagine the moment the weave gives way.
Then comes Ibrahim Afegbua, bending annealed wire into hairstyles of staggering intricacy. The impulse springs from childhood in Kaduna, watching his stepmother braid hair with a craftsman’s patience. His women—crowned in metallic swirls—speak less to beauty than to authority. Since winning LIMCAF in 2017, he has shown in France and Belgium. In Lagos, his sculptures seem to hum, antennae tuned to ancestral memory.
Fragments gleam in Edward Samuel’s mosaics. Winner of the 2018 El Anatsui Prize, he has become one of Nigeria’s foremost mosaicists. He makes no attempt to disguise the fracture. Instead, he elevates it. Each shard is a sliver of loss, reassembled into wholeness. His art insists that life itself is mosaic: broken, rearranged, and—against all odds—made coherent.
In Priscilla Oryina’s embroideries, no such comfort resides. On wool and Algarara cloth, the softness of thread becomes ambush. Her acclaimed Almajiri series, first unveiled in Dakar, returns here with muted ferocity. It depicts women bearing unacknowledged burdens, children exposed to precarity. What looks like gentle craft is, in fact, testimony—urgent and unflinching.
And then the scorch. Kelvin Ijiko practises pyrography with the deliberation of ritual. He etches African history and cosmology into wood, each scorch irreversible. In an age addicted to the undo button, Ijiko offers no reprieve. Once marked, never erased. His panels blaze with paradox: destruction and regeneration fused in endless duel.
Together, these artists, alongside the others, form less a chorus than an insurgency. Their mediums heckle and argue across the gallery: thread taunting tesserae, wire coiling round wool, fire licking at the edges of paint. This is not harmony but voltage. In collaboration with 1952 Africa, Legacy makes clear that LIMCAF has not merely produced winners since 2007. It has seeded the Nigerian art scene with some of its fiercest and most ungovernable voices.
What lingers is not conclusion but charge. Thread portraits nearly breathe. Wire hairstyles bristle with ancestral signal. Mosaics flaunt their scars. Embroideries whisper testimonies disguised as texture. Pyrography brands memory into permanence. One leaves not with answers but with questions, seared into the skin.
Because LEGACY, as this exhibition insists, is no trophy neatly bestowed. It is seized, defended, fought for—stitched, soldered, scorched. It is not relic but live current.
So when 1952 Africa Gallery swings its doors open on September 20, Lagos will not merely witness another opening. It will breathe defiance. For LEGACY is not a monument to what has been. It is energy in motion, pulling every visitor into its charge.
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