A group exhibition brings diasporic perspectives into dialogue around identity, return, and collective presence.
Sahara Longe, Green and Purple Nude, 2025. Oil on Jute, 90 x 1845cm. Courtesy of the artist and DADA Gallery.
DADA Gallery inaugurates its permanent Lagos home with ‘The Beautyful Ones’, a group exhibition that marks both a physical and conceptual homecoming. Opening on 8 November 2025, the exhibition brings together works by Yagazie Emezi, Sahara Longe, Silvana Mendes, Cece Philips, Taylor Simmons, Larissa de Souza, and Cameron Ugbodu, whose practices span painting, photography, and mixed media. Across distinct visual languages, the exhibition reflects on how identity and belonging are continually reshaped by distance, memory, and return, situating Lagos as both a site and an interlocutor in diasporic exchange.
The opening signals an important moment for DADA Gallery, establishing a permanent presence in Lagos that foregrounds dialogue between local and global artistic currents. Rather than framing diaspora solely as absence or displacement, ‘The Beautyful Ones’ approaches it as an active condition, producing new ways of seeing, making, and gathering.
Reclaiming a Title, Reimagining a Future
The exhibition takes its title from Ayi Kwei Armah’s 1968 novel The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, a canonical work that captured the disillusionment of post-independence Ghana. Where Armah’s phrase spoke to deferred possibility and moral exhaustion, DADA Gallery reclaims it as a declaration grounded in the present. In this reimagining, the beautiful ones are no longer anticipated figures of a distant future but artists and communities already shaping contemporary worlds.
This reframing lends the exhibition a quiet insistence. The works on view do not perform optimism as spectacle, but instead articulate forms of endurance, care, and self-definition forged through lived experience. Meaning emerges not only from individual artworks but also from the relational space created between them and between the artists and their audience.
Diaspora, Proximity, and Visual Language
Bringing together artists whose practices are shaped by movement across geographies, ‘The Beautyful Ones’ stages a shared room of conversation. Each artist approaches Lagos differently, through gestures of return, echoes of elsewhere, or negotiations between layered histories and unfolding futures. The exhibition resists a singular diasporic narrative, instead allowing difference and proximity to coexist.
Sahara Longe’s paintings, including Green and Purple Nude (2025), draw on figuration and material presence to explore intimacy and self-possession. Other works across the exhibition engage photography, portraiture, and abstraction as tools for navigating memory, embodiment, and social visibility. Together, the artists trace how diasporic practices remain responsive to Lagos, not as a fixed point of origin, but as a living, shifting context.
What unites the exhibition is not stylistic coherence, but a shared attentiveness to rhythm, presence, and exchange. The gallery becomes a site where multiple temporalities intersect, where past and future are negotiated through the immediacy of the present.
A Permanent Home in Lagos
The opening of ‘The Beautyful Ones’ also marks the reopening of DADA Gallery Lagos at its permanent address on Norman Williams Street in Ikoyi. By establishing a long-term base in the city, the gallery affirms its commitment to sustained engagement with artists, audiences, and local contexts. This move positions DADA not only as an exhibition space but as a platform for ongoing conversation, collaboration, and visibility within Lagos’s evolving cultural landscape.
The gallery’s reopening underscores the importance of physical spaces for gathering and exchange. In a moment when many artistic practices operate across digital and transnational networks, ‘The Beautyful Ones’ insists on the value of proximity, of bodies sharing space, and of artworks encountered in relation to one another.
‘The Beautyful Ones’ is on view at DADA Gallery, 49 Norman Williams Street, Ikoyi, Lagos, opening 8 November 2025. For more information, please visit DADA Gallery.
