Lagos Art Week Confronts History, Identity and Belonging Through Nigerian Art

West Africa's premier and largest art fair, ART X Lagos, has been held in Lagos, Nigeria. Held from November 5 to 8, the fair was the centrepiece of Nigeria's annual art week, with exhibitions, installations, music, discussions and film screenings at the Federal Palace Hotel on Victoria Island, while galleries and museums across Lagos also hosted exhibitions.

Visitors moved between 15 partitioned exhibition spaces, pausing to study, connect with and collect works, with thousands gathering at the fair.

Together, the exhibitions explored cultural erosion, migration and belonging, examining how art can preserve collective memory and reconnect people with their heritage.

Contemporary sculptor Ndidi Dike's installation, Residues of Past Encounters II, features a wooden canoe suspended above a glass surface, with sand arranged around its edges. Above it hangs fabric in the Adire style, associated with Yoruba women of southwest Nigeria, bearing silhouettes of tightly packed people.

The sound of waves plays in the background, evoking the Atlantic coastline at Badagry, a historic Nigerian town that was once a notorious transit point for enslaved West Africans; the sand and sound were sourced from the town. Dike's installation explores the intertwined histories of the transatlantic slave trade, colonialism, memory and migration.

'The sound of the waves makes you contemplate, makes you think deeper, and then you begin to imagine, perhaps, how those who have left our shores under various circumstances must have been feeling mentally, the prospect of leaving home and never, perhaps, seeing it again,' Dike told Al Jazeera.

Dike draws a connection between historical displacement and contemporary migration. 'I find that there is a correlation between slavery and what is happening now. It's always the best of our demographic that are taken or who decide to go abroad,' she said.

Now in its 11th edition, this year's fair took the theme 'A New Chapter, A New Decade', drawing inspiration from the pioneering generation of Nigerian artists, architects, educators and thinkers who helped shape modernism in the country.

ART X founder Tokini Peterside said the older generation demonstrated that innovation need not mean abandoning cultural inheritance. 'Our histories are not simply things to preserve or look back upon. They are living sources of knowledge that can inform what we create next,' she told Al Jazeera.

One artist whose legacy is being celebrated is Ladi Kwali, a Nigerian potter and ceramicist, featured in an exhibition titled Beyond the Vessel. Her handcrafted pots display motifs of scorpions, lizards and butterflies. Kwali came from a long line of Gbari women potters in the village of Kwali, near Abuja, and her portrait has appeared on Nigerian currency. Curator Jareh Das said preserving Kwali's legacy would inspire future generations.

At Afriart Gallery, a Kampala-based space exhibiting Ugandan art, visitor Barbara Barungi found a painting by Daniel Atenyi made with coffee, and jokingly described the fair as Nigeria's 'Met Gala.'