Five Artists, One World in Motion

 Yinka Olatunbosun

Lagos’s art audience is turning its gaze towards Ikota, where FLUX, a group exhibition featuring five contemporary artists, opens on September 26 at ArkHive by Creath. Running until October 17, the exhibition brings together emerging and established voices whose works examine the shifting nature of identity, urban transformation and the socio-cultural realities of contemporary Nigeria.

Organised by Creath, a creative platform focused on technology-driven art spaces and creative infrastructure, FLUX takes advantage of ArkHive’s multidimensional gallery environment. Situated in the commercial hub of Ikota along the Lekki-Epe Expressway, the space provides a contemporary setting for an exhibition concerned with movement, transition and change.

The premise of FLUX is rooted in the idea of continuous motion. Across textured canvas paintings, mixed media, digital installations and experimental photography, the five artists — Oshorenoya David Francis, Wilson Chukwuka Clifford, Gift Osague, Bola Obatuyi and Ayela-Uwangue Nosawema — explore how personal and collective narratives are continually reshaped.

Their works bring traditional African references into conversation with contemporary visual languages, reflecting the contradictions of life in a rapidly digitising Lagos. Identity, memory, migration, displacement and self-discovery emerge as recurring concerns, while the materiality of the works themselves becomes part of the conversation about transformation.

Rather than treating the artwork as a fixed object, FLUX invites viewers to consider the unstable territory between what has been and what is still becoming.

For curator Esther Adaeze Ezenweze, the title captures this state of transition.

“FLUX translates to evolution, transition, or concurrent movement. It creates a symbiotic connection between a phase of transformation and the malleability of its final form. FLUX represents the voyage of becoming: a motion from sensation to sentimentality, the impermanence of identity, and the psychology of growth,” she says.

Wilson Chukwuka’s paintings probe the psychological interior of a self in perpetual emotional motion. His repetitive marks suggest thoughts being rewritten in real time, turning pattern into a visual metaphor for an unsettled inner life.

Gift Osague approaches flux through material transformation. Working with discarded fabrics that have already had previous lives, she reassembles cotton, silk, tulle and wax into figurative compositions, allowing the discarded to acquire new meanings.

Bola Obatuyi, meanwhile, challenges inherited ideas about femininity. Through fabric and acrylic paint, she presents women who resist the narrow images imposed upon them, addressing body positivity, sisterhood and defiance of socially constructed notions of womanhood.

Ayela-Uwangue Nosawema explores vulnerability from a more psychological vantage point. Working across acrylic, oil, spray paint, charcoal, crayon and found materials, the multimedia artist constructs layered spaces in which abstraction and figuration coexist. Muted palettes, expressive marks and carefully handled light and shadow create atmospheres of introspection.

“His paintings reveal how much of ourselves we hide and how much of the human interior remains just beyond what the world is ready to receive,” Ezenweze says.

For Francis Oshorenoya, flux is bound up with the immigrant experience. Nigerian-born and based in the United Kingdom, Francis examines solitude, transformation and the unsettled process of becoming. Working mainly in mixed media on paper and canvas, he makes introspective paintings and drawings about inner desire, fantasy, identity and self-discovery.

His experience of living between places gives his work another dimension: the emotional space occupied by someone negotiating more than one sense of home.

Together, the five artists create a conversation about contemporary African experience without attempting to reduce it to a single narrative. Migration and memory sit alongside emotional transformation; questions of gender and identity intersect with material reuse; and the individual confronts a world that is itself in constant motion.

Osague, a contemporary Nigerian visual artist from Benin City, Edo State, began her artistic journey at nine. She obtained a Higher National Diploma in Painting from the School of Art and Industrial Design, Auchi Polytechnic, in 2021. Based in Lagos, she works full-time as a studio artist, transforming discarded fabrics into fabric-collage works.

Obatuyi, born in Ibadan, obtained an HND in Fine Arts from Auchi Polytechnic between 2015 and 2017. Her practice combines fabric and acrylic paint while addressing body positivity, sisterhood and resistance to conventional expectations of female beauty.

Clifford is a multidisciplinary contemporary painter whose practice ranges from impressionistic palette-knife strokes to vibrant acrylic brushwork. Since beginning his sustained engagement with painting and other media in 2017, he has developed a visual vocabulary built around recurring symbols, motifs and patterns.

Nosawema’s multimedia practice centres on the emotional and psychological dimensions of human experience. His layered pictorial spaces allow abstraction and figuration to overlap, creating images that dwell on introspection and psychological depth.

Francis holds a master’s degree in Contemporary Art Practice from De Montfort University, Leicester, United Kingdom. His mixed-media practice explores solitude, inner desire, fantasy, identity and the continuing process of self-discovery.

At its heart, FLUX is an exhibition about instability — not necessarily as crisis, but as the condition of being alive and continually remade by experience. Its five artists approach that condition from different directions, leaving the viewer with a question that the exhibition itself cannot neatly resolve: what remains of the self when everything around it is changing?