With Paint, Pixels and Pulse, +234 Art Fair Takes Over Lagos – THISDAYLIVE

+234 Art Fair Takes Over Lagos

Exploding with colour and ideas, Lagos’s +234 Art Fair turns Victoria Island into a buzzing arena where art, ambition, and curiosity collide. 

Okechukwu Uwaezuoke reports 

First impressions hit like a wave: colours explode, flashing and ricocheting off walls, almost defiantly proclaiming the fair’s vibrant tone. Curiosity and speculation vie for space as visitors navigate the sprawling, quasi-labyrinthine venue. Some lean in to inspect brushstrokes; others quietly weigh prices, lips pursed in calculation. It’s a choreography of attention – a game of glances and judgments where every corner holds potential for discovery or hesitation.

Against a serene blue wall, gold-framed paintings assert calm authority. Earthy pigments, supple figures, gestures caught mid-motion – these works don’t just hang; they respond, they observe. Intimate yet insistent. Elsewhere, larger canvases stake their claim: portraits brush against abstraction, surreal gestures punctuate figuration. A furious blur of red and white vibrates against the wall; another painting of formally dressed figures radiates austere dignity.

Then, dozens of miniature paintings line the white walls like meticulously arranged thought experiments. Photographs, mixed media, and miniature narratives—each a portal into another perspective—set the stage for last Wednesday’s VIP opening of the third edition of +234 Art Fair at the Ecobank Pan African Centre in Victoria Island, Lagos. Anticipation circulates like an undercurrent of electricity as aficionados, serenaded by a live band’s instrumental renditions (later accentuated by songstress Yinka Davies’ honeyed voice), saunter past installations. Collectors adopt the practised squint of professional discernment.

Everything moves with invisible choreography. The eyes are guided from work to work by the subtle promptings of curatorial vision. Together, they construct a narrative: intimate, expansive, seething with Lagos’s restless pulse. Eyimofe Ideh, as the lead, directs it all with steady, research-driven authority. Beside her, as her assistant, Faith Esene exerts a subtler influence, conjuring cohesion from potential chaos.

Within that structure, distinct zones emerge. The Digital Pavilion, curated by Jojo Dopamu with Ima Ekpo as co-curator, erupts with defiant experiments and media that eschew mere decorative subservience. Nearby, the Photography Pavilion, guided by Vetum Galadima, slows the tempo. Lens-based work demands attention, urging narrative over spectacle, patience over the hurried gaze.

Tola Akerele oversees it all with quiet authority – General Manager and CEO of the National Theatre, founder of +234 Art Fair and SOTO Gallery. Akerele occupies a curious dual vantage: institutional custodian and independent cultural entrepreneur. That duality is the fair’s invisible pulse. The fair is civic in instinct, nimble in execution – attentive to infrastructure, yet not impervious to the restless creative energies swirling just beyond its walls.

Ensuring smooth operation is project manager Joanna Oyefeso, whose logistical choreography keeps the machinery moving with clockwise precision. Five hundred and fifty-four emerging Nigerian artists participate across painting, sculpture, installation, photography, digital media, and performance—scale enough to unleash chaos anywhere else. Here, everything unfolds with effortless rhythm, each movement and encounter orchestrated with unobtrusive finesse, a quiet mastery that turns potential disorder into a seamless, kinetic experience.

Yet the story of +234 Art Fair 2026, which opened March 5 and concludes today, isn’t just the spectacle. Momentum here isn’t obvious – it gathers quietly, expands imperceptibly. Earlier editions tested patronage waters; this third outing ventures further, probing the depth of a word often said but rarely meant: inclusivity.

Lagos is no stranger to art fairs. They arrive with white walls, velvet-rope VIP lists—diplomats, financiers, real-estate barons, the city’s small, opinionated art cognoscenti—and soft promises of market buoyancy. +234 charts a different course, aiming not for volume but for greater breadth. The focus is on expanding reach rather than making noise, widening both participation and perspective.

The curatorial team didn’t just fly in. Long before crates landed in Victoria Island, they had been trawling Nigeria’s creative underbelly—Kaduna, Enugu, the places where art survives off-grid. They knocked on doors, visited studios, and sat with ears open, listening. This was analogue outreach: unfiltered, uncompromising, real.

The payoff is striking. The tonal range captivates. Some works present themselves with quiet restraint—charcoal sketches, tentative photographic studies—while others surge upward, seizing the space with assertive confidence. Moving through the fair feels less like navigating a corridor of transactions and more like stepping into a sequence of encounters, each work proposing its own conversation.

One installation proves difficult to ignore: “Structure of Memory” by Kaduna-based artist Bara. Stitched jute sacks—the coarse fabric that ferries grain along Northern trade routes—rise into provisional walls beneath a low-hanging canopy. Faces emerge, half-erased; names trail off unfinished; marks resemble interrupted testimonies. Visitors do not merely observe the work; they step into it. In a fair environment where movement is constant and glances are fleeting, Bara’s installation slows the pulse, insisting on pause and duration—reflective without sentimentality, political without slogans.

Moments like this recalibrate the atmosphere of the fair. The emphasis shifts, if only briefly, from acquisition to contemplation, reminding visitors that beneath the choreography of prices, lists and negotiations lies the quieter, more enduring labour of meaning-making.

Inclusivity here extends beyond aesthetics. Prices are pitched with first-time buyers in mind, sustaining last year’s emphasis on patronage as participation rather than performance. Questions about cost draw plain answers—no raised eyebrows, no coded intimidation. Ownership is framed as an invitation, not a privilege.

This recalibration may be the fair’s quietest—and most radical—gesture. In a city where reputation functions as currency and access often stratified, +234 cultivates approachability without surrendering rigour. School tours drift through the aisles beside seasoned collectors. A children’s gallery invites tactile exploration rather than polite observation. Panels and masterclasses unfold with conversational ease, replacing the usual hush of institutional reverence with something closer to dialogue.

The fair’s relationship with the wider city feels equally deliberate. Lagos Gallery Weekend maintains a dedicated stand, turning the event into a cultural nexus rather than a rival attraction. A collaboration with the Spanish Embassy, marking two decades of its art competition, introduces a note of cross-cultural exchange. Street culture, too, finds institutional oxygen through the Lagos Street Art Festival, where visitors are invited to paint, experiment and leave their own marks in situ.

Meanwhile, Kunbi Oni, Senior Collection Specialist at MoMA, delivers the keynote, introducing an international cadence to the proceedings. Nigerian creativity, she suggests, does not petition for relevance abroad; it already participates.

A documentary, supported by The Osahon Okunbo Foundation, traces the curatorial journeys—studio visits, roadside conversations, trust slowly accrued. It reframes inclusivity not as branding but as process, labour made visible. And why does this matter? Because art fairs—even the glamorous ones—have a habit of calcifying into ritual: the same names, the same circuits, the same hierarchies quietly preserved. +234 Art Fair 2026 does not dismantle the model; it stretches it. Under Akerele’s stewardship, the +234 country code becomes connective tissue—linking regions, practices and audiences that rarely occupy the same room.

In Lagos, a city that seldom slows its pace, spaces like this matter more than they appear to. Visitors may arrive expecting a marketplace of art, but they often leave with something closer to a map.