For more than four decades, Ndidi Dike has pushed sculpture, painting and installation into an enquiry into history, labour, trade and the materials that carry memory. On the occasion of her new installation Residues of Past Encounters II (2026), presented at this year’s fair, the Lagos-based Nigerian-British artist looks back on her career in conversation with N’Goné Fall and Femi Lijadu.

• Ndidi Dike, Artist
• N’Goné Fall, Independent Curator and Essayist, Curator of Residues of Past Encounters II and Member of the ART X Lagos Advisory Board
• Femi Lijadu, Lawyer, Art Collector and Member of the ART X Lagos Advisory Board

Ladi Kwali, this year’s ART X Icon, took a centuries-old Gbari pottery tradition from Kwali village to the world’s museums and the Nigerian twenty-naira note. The session opens with a screening of Dr Jareh Das’s documentary on her life and work. Das then speaks with ceramic artist Isis Dove-Edwin about Kwali’s legacy today, and about the paths of women artists who, coming from many different backgrounds, have broken through in a field still largely dominated by men.

• Dr Jareh Das, Curator, Researcher and Writer, Curator of Ladi Kwali: Beyond the Vessel
• Isis Dove-Edwin, Ceramic Artist

In 1926, Palaver, the first feature film shot in Nigeria, was made through a colonial lens. A hundred years later, Nigeria has one of the largest film industries in the world. Clip by clip, historian Ed Keazor traces this century of Nigerian cinema and asks who held the camera, and how Nigerians took it back to tell their own stories.

Ed Keazor, historian, lawyer, writer and documentary filmmaker, Director of the Nsibidi Institute.

Following the screening, Kachi Benson discusses how art can turn a national trauma into an account of resilience and a way of finding a new humanity, as told by one of Nigeria’s most compelling documentary directors.

• Kachi Benson, filmmaker and director of Mothers of Chibok
• Moderator (to be confirmed)

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