At the entrance to this year’s ART X Lagos stands ‘Aṣọẹbí’ – Sokari Douglas Camp’s sculptural installation of five women clad in coordinated green and pink outfits. Also known as ‘family cloth’, Aṣọẹbí is chosen and shared for weddings, festivals and rites and can serve as an identifier of people belonging to one another across West Africa. Drawing on her own Kalabari heritage and the Black Atlantic's routes of exchange, Douglas Camp’s use of public space and monumental scale addresses the themes of memory and ecology. Here, the chorus of women invite spectators to become participants and honour those who hold ceremonies together. The steel sculptures and ceremonial textile represent a civic welcome as they explore kinship, community and collective pride.

Douglas Camp’s work, one of The Projects at this 10th anniversary edition of West Africa’s premier art fair, add apt layers of meaning to its curatorial theme, ‘Imagining Otherwise, No Matter the Tide’. Each diverse offering asks us to consider how bustling global cities like Lagos can foster and nurture resilient futures.

Nearby, in the Balmoral Marquee, is another powerful installation, ‘External Realities, Internal Geographies’ by Nengi Omuku. The artist is known for oil painting on sányán cloth, a traditional Yorùbá aṣọ-òkè textile. Her centrepiece work ‘This Too Shall Pass’ (2025) depicts crowds of people queuing for fuel in Lagos – an everyday scene yet here transformed and placed within a surreal garden setting, under an apocalyptic sky that descends like a multi-coloured shroud.

This entrancing painting is surrounded by limited-edition artisanal aṣọ-òkè stools handcrafted by Nigerian textile designer Ituen Basi, courtesy of Omuku’s charity The Art Of Healing (TAOH), which offers art therapy workshops to psychiatric patients. These elements combine into an invitation for audiences to enter into an uplifting, internal landscape. Using impressionist techniques of meticulous layered colour and brushwork, Omuku conflates her observations of the realities of Lagosians with dreamscapes that depict collective rest and refuge.

Similarly, Dennis Osadebe’s waterfront installation ‘Mass (Devotion)’ becomes a site of healing and reflection during the fair. The artist has turned 11 white monobloc chairs – ubiquitous items of furniture across the streets of Lagos – into a monumental circular structure that assumes a surreal presence. Through a new process of Re-compose, the chairs are re-imagined in fibreglass and cathedral-like stained glass, simultaneously blending the industrial and the celestial. Evoking prayer circles, gatherings and collective devotion, the constellation-like piece navigates the tensions between the city’s bustling urban landscape and the spiritual needs of its hard-working inhabitants.

Viewed together, and set against the backdrop of this ever-hopeful megalopolis, the work of these three Nigerian artists proposes new ways of living and being together in our troubled times. Their poetic provocations will certainly resonate long after the fair as we too imagine otherwise, no matter the tide.