If you have ever stepped into Lagos, you know it is a city that does not merely exist, it pulsates. It is this unrelenting energy that visual artist Funmilayo Kayode has captured and brought to Nairobi in her latest exhibition, “people, places, phases“.

Hosted at Art Africa’s Sanaa Gallery within the Two Rivers Mall from September 7 to 30, 2025 the exhibition unfolds as a vivid, large-scale photographic meditation on Ìdúmọ̀tà, one of Lagos Island’s most visually charged urban hubs. Through her lens, Kayode transforms the chaotic Nigerian metropolis into a structured field of colour, pressure, movement, and symbolic density.

Walking into the gallery, the presentation immediately arrests you with its clean structural clarity. Mounted thoughtfully against the stark white gallery walls, the photographs form a measured, rhythmic dance of urban life: crowded markets, the iconic yellow danfo buses, layered tin rooftops, a sea of umbrellas, weathered facades, and bodies in constant motion.

Rather than isolating each frame, Kayode links them together as fragments of a single, sprawling urban symphony. It forces the viewer to traverse Ìdúmọ̀tà not just as a geographical location, but as a shifting emotional landscape.

Kayode’s genius lies in her ability to treat the city simultaneously as her subject and her architectural framework. In one frame, a dense swarm of market activity stretches beneath a canopy of commercial signage and tangled overhead cables, while the yellow buses punctuate the bottom of the scene like recurring notes in a musical score.

In another, open umbrellas cluster into vibrant fields of colour, masterfully turning urban congestion into an abstract pattern. Yet, amidst the noise, she finds quietude; a single veiled figure framed against the sky and surrounding utility poles offers a powerful moment of stillness within the larger intensity of the collection.

What Kayode delivers is far from a simplistic documentary of a city; it is a fine-art study of urban evolution. Using scale, repetition, and atmospheric lighting, she shows how the people of Ìdúmọ̀tà and the architecture they inhabit continually recreate one another.

The human figures here are never detached from their environment. They emerge through the dignity of labour, passage, and sheer presence—absorbed by the market’s density yet never losing their individual weight. The city is not a passive backdrop; it is an active, living force.

The exhibition’s title, People, Places, Phases, serves as a perfect roadmap for the viewer. “People” are represented not just by faces, but by their endurance, commerce, and tight proximity. “Places” materialize through the grit of the streets, historical monuments, and buildings shaped by time and human wear. “Phases” live in the constant tug-of-war between brightness and ruin, motion and stillness. Kayode’s Lagos is never static; it is always shifting, always under pressure, and aggressively alive.

The curation inside The Sanaa Gallery deepens this dialogue. The clean, modern architectural space allows the visual loudness of Lagos to breathe without overwhelming the audience. Furthermore, the strategic placement of sculptural objects and pedestal works creates a beautiful conversation between the flat photographic surfaces and material culture. These physical pieces subtly echo the textures and craft seen in the images, turning the gallery from a simple wall display into an immersive environment.

Color choice also carries significant weight in this body of work. The signature yellow of the transit buses, the sharp pinks and blues of market umbrellas, and the muted greys of concrete and sky are deliberate compositional tools. They guide the human eye through dense scenes that might otherwise trigger sensory overload, proving Kayode’s immense visual discipline.

Ultimately, People, Places, Phases succeeds because it refuses to reduce Lagos to a mere spectacle of third-world chaos. While the images are visually abundant, they look past the surface to ask deeper questions: How does a city hold onto its memory while constantly changing its shape? How do its people inhabit such immense pressure, and how can beauty emerge from compression and strain?

As a contribution to contemporary African photography, this exhibition stands as a thoughtful, visually assured triumph. It cements Funmilayo Kayode’s position as an artist deeply attentive to the formal possibilities of place, turning urban survival into images of enduring beauty.

The post In the rhythms of Ìdúmọ̀tà: Funmilayo Kayode’s people, places, phases first appeared on The Times of Abuja.

Uche Rita Okolie’s photograph, No Time, currently showing at the Sanaa Gallery inside Nairobi’s Two Rivers Mall, Kenya, is a profound study of urban pressure.

Presented as part of the group exhibition No Time to Say No Time: Lagos Island in Motion running from 25 November 2024 to 15 December 2024, the image captures something deeper than mere dramatic chaos.

Instead, it frames the quiet, relentless friction of a city growing upwards, heavily wired, deeply layered, and moving far too fast for the naked eye to process comfortably.

The lens focuses on a slice of Lagos Island where architecture feels less like shelter and more like a visual argument. Rising just left of the centre is a massive building bearing the blunt letters “NAI”. Its stained concrete façade carries the unmistakable weight of time, bureaucracy, and institutional history. Yet, sprouting like metallic weeds from its roof and the skyline behind it is a dense thicket of telecom masts and antennae.

Directly to the right, a newer glass-fronted structure slices sharply through the frame. Its rigid, black-and-white geometry projects a modern, corporate authority; polished, reflective, and entirely impersonal. Tucked beneath these giants sits an old clock tower, partially swallowed by trees and a web of overhead cables. Its face remains visible, but it is clearly overwhelmed by the towering structures competing for space around it.

This is precisely where Okolie’s work becomes compelling. She is not merely documenting buildings; she is exploring how these structures jostle for attention, stacking different eras, social statuses, and human ambitions into a single view. Rather than presenting Lagos Island as a pretty skyline to be admired from a distance, Okolie treats it as a dense urban text where concrete, glass, clock faces, and cables press tightly against one another.

The title, No Time, gives the piece its critical edge. While time is literally present in the clock tower, it also forms the very structure of the photograph. Older civic architecture is pinned beneath institutional blocks, which are in turn dwarfed by modern communication infrastructure.

Meanwhile, the sleek glass façade on the right interrupts and dominates everything else. This is not a neat historical timeline; it is time stacked unevenly. Lagos Island does not clear away its past to make way for the future; it absorbs, covers, and crowds its history together.

The composition thrives on vertical tension. The eye is pulled upward from the clock tower to the “NAI” building, and higher still to the telecom masts, before being sharply deflected by the reflective grid of the corporate building on the right.

It leaves the viewer with the distinct sensation of looking at a city that simply refuses to rest. Even the messy wires cutting across the lower half of the frame act as lines of interruption, proving that urban space is rarely neatly arranged. In Lagos, the city speaks through its obstructions.

Interestingly, there are no people in this shot. In most depictions of Lagos, the human element—traders, commuters, and bustling crowds—supplies the energy. Here, Okolie purposefully removes the human body from the centre, allowing the city’s infrastructure to stage its own restless performance. The buildings become the primary actors.

The masts hint at constant connectivity and surveillance, the clock tower points to a fading public order, and the glass façade speaks of capital and high aspiration. The city has not stopped just because the camera shutter clicked; it is moving forcefully through its own systems.

There is also a subtle battle happening between memory and modernity. The clock tower, with its older architectural design, feels ceremonial—a quiet reminder of a past civic order. Yet, compressed by the surrounding structures, it has lost its dominance.

Refreshingly, Okolie avoids cheap nostalgia. She does not mourn an older Lagos with sentimental tears. Instead, she shows how memory actually survives under pressure: partly hidden by trees, crossed by wires, and overshadowed by new symbols of power.

Colour plays a vital role in unifying the scene. Washed in warm, yellowish tones, the photograph gives the buildings a dusty, sun-stained quality that evokes the actual climate, heat, and age of Lagos. This warmth prevents the image from feeling like a cold architectural blueprint. Even the rigid, reflective glass building on the right, which introduces a cooler corporate logic, is caught in this same golden light. Okolie forces the city’s various surfaces to share the same atmosphere, even when they belong to completely different economic worlds.

As a piece of fine art photography, No Time succeeds because it prioritises tension over simple description. It does not just ask us to recognise Lagos Island; it challenges us to read it.

It forces us to question the relationship between the old public clock and the new telecom mast, between concrete and glass, and between a city’s historical identity and its aggressive hunger for expansion.

Within the broader context of the Lagos Island in Motion exhibition, this photograph serves as a anchor. It illustrates the title’s urgency not through traffic jams, but through architecture under acceleration. Okolie’s triumph lies in her ability to make Lagos Island look simultaneously familiar and unstable. In her hands, it becomes a restless, living monument to urban urgency, a city with no time to explain its contradictions, and no time to pause before reinventing itself.

The post Uche Rita Okolie’s No Time: Lagos Island and the architecture of urgency first appeared on The Times of Abuja.