Art X Lagos 2025: key highlights as West Africa’s leading art fair marks 10 years
From the 6th to the 9th of November, the leading West African art fair Art X Lagos celebrates its 10th birthday at the Federal Palace on Victoria Island. Founded by Tokini Peterside-Schwebig in 2016, the fair has become an unmissable event in the global art calendar, attracting galleries from over 70 countries and participants from 170 countries since its launch.
This year’s thematic focus, “Imagining Otherwise, No Matter the Tide”, considers the potential for creativity to create stronger communities and transform urban environments. This will be explored not only through contemporary art but holistic programming encompassing film (Art X Cinema), music (Art X Live!) and special projects such as Art Across Borders.
Alongside this milestone edition of Art X, the city is filled with exhibitions and exciting creative collaborations celebrating the fast-growing Lagos Art Week. Here is FLO’s guide to the must-see presentations at Art X and across the city.
ART X Lagos 2025: Imagining Otherwise, No Matter The Tide, Lagos, Nigeria, 6–9 November 2025, artxlagos.com
At Art X
The Art X Icon Exhibition: An Exacting Eye by J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere
Curated by Missla Libsekal, this exhibition explores six decades of the legendary Nigerian photographer J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere’s work. Displayed in the Federal Palace Lobby and the Waterfront Garden, it highlights the artist’s unwavering commitment to finding beauty in the everyday. The artist’s archive contains thousands of never-before-exhibited images, and this exhibition focuses on his photographs of Nigeria’s physical and human geography, through which he documented the nation’s vast resources. Alongside the show is a pop-up photography studio, Portraits of Modernity, inspired by Ojeikere’s work. Curated by Fikayo Adebajo and designed to resemble a 1960s Lagosian garden, visitors can drop in for a shoot or take self portraits that bridge past and present.
JD Okhai Ojeikere, Nigerian Culture Series, Portrait of Maiden Dancers, 1974. Courtesy of ART X Lagos.
External Realities, Internal Geographies by Nengi Omuku
A highlight of Art X’s special projects at the Federal Palace, this solo exhibition of Nigerian artist Nengi Omuku explores the history of textiles in Nigeria and collective experience through combining scenes inspired by everyday life with dreamscapes. Omuku’s works are created using sanyan, a hand-spun cotton cloth traditionally woven by the Yoruba people, upon which paintings are gradually built up through layers of delicate brushwork. On Saturday 8th November, the artist will host a textile collage workshop with The Art of Healing (TOAH), an organisation founded by Omuku in 2018 and inspired by the UK charity Hospital Rooms, with whom she has frequently collaborated.
AMG Projects: Joy Adeboye
This year, Art X has introduced a Spotlight Galleries section to platform emerging galleries. One of the highlights is a solo presentation of Nigerian artist Joy Adeboye by AMG Projects. Created in Adeboye’s signature translucent watercolour style, this new body of work titled Equanimity was partly inspired by the artist’s residency at the Lion Sands Game Reserve in South Africa, and offers a meditation on surrender, resilience and the stillness that can be found in uncertainty.
Portrait Nengi Omuku, 2024. Photo Todd-White Art Photography.
Beyond Art X
LagosPhoto Festival
LagosPhoto is a month-long international photography festival featuring exhibitions, workshops and public art installations, held across multiple venues in Lagos and Ibadan. Launched in 2010 by visionary curator and founder of the African Artists’ Foundation, Azu Nwagbogu, this year’s edition invites artists worldwide to respond to the open call theme of ‘incarceration’ in myriad ways. Some explore how imprisonment can be self-imposed, while others examine its physical, mental, political and social forms with the aim of answering the curators’ provocation to “liberate narratives that are powerful artefacts of our time”. A particular highlight is the series of exhibitions at Freedom Park, once a colonial-era prison and now a home for culture and leisure. Exhibitions also take place at the Didi Museum, Nahous Gallery, AAF, and Ibadan’s New Culture Studio.
Date: 27 October 2025 - 23 January 2026; lagosphotofestival.com
Amina Kadous from the series White Gold, 2020 - ongoing. Courtesy of Amina Kadous and LagosPhoto Festival.
Osogbo at kó
Bringing together key works from the 1960s-2000s, this important exhibition traces the evolution of the Osogbo Art School and its impact on the course of modern art in Nigeria. This influential movement originated from a series of experimental art workshops held between 1962 and 1966 at the Mbari Mbayo Club in Osogbo. A generation of artists emerged whose work prioritised individual expression over formal training, while drawing on a visual language rooted in Yoruba culture.
Date: Tuesday - Saturday 11am-6pm; 6 November 2025 - 10 January 2026. Location: kó, 36 Cameron Road, Flat 1a, Ikoyi, Lagos, Nigeria. ko-artspace.com
The Beautyful Ones at DADA Gallery
DADA Gallery, previously a nomadic gallery operating between London and Lagos, inaugurates its permanent Lagos home during Lagos Art Week with a group exhibition featuring Yagazie Emezi, Sahara Longe, Silvana Mendes, Cece Philips, Taylor Simmons, Larissa de Souza and Ebako Ugbodu. The exhibition’s title borrows from Ayi Kwei Armah’s 1968 novel The Beautyful Ones are Not Yet Born, and takes the curatorial position that “The Beautyful Ones” are not worlds away but already here, shaping new realities in the present.
Date: opening Saturday 8 November from 2-6pm, Location: 49 Norman Williams Street, Lagos Island thedadagallery.com
ART X Lagos 2025, themed “Imagining Otherwise, No Matter the Tide,” will take place in Lagos, Nigeria, from 6 to 9 November 2025. For more information, visit artxlagos.com.
Words by Sofia Carreira- Wham
