Written By Ejiose Ikuenobe, Fortune Ibeh
There is a particular kind of curiosity that hits when you step into a room full of strangers who are all trying to figure out the same thing you are. That is what met us at the door of Didi Museum on Victoria Island on August 28, 2026. Guests moved with a quiet alertness, circling the same unspoken question: how do the works of eight emerging artists, each so distinct from the next, connect to one central theme across a two-day exhibition?
That question was the whole reason we were there.
As representatives of LSTV Worldwide London, we had not come simply to cover an opening. We came to understand how these seven emerging artists, brought together for the first time, were interpreting and sharing in the exhibition’s central theme: “We Go Again.”
By the time we left, we understood that We Go Again was never just the name of an exhibition. It was a confession.
Curated by Dara Shonubi in collaboration with MSV Mag, the exhibition brought together seven emerging artists: Philip Udeka, Johaan Martin, Z4, Ayomide Popoola, Davees, Nathaniel Goodnews and Laila Shuaib, under one deceptively simple premise: persistence, uncertainty, experimentation and renewal.
Four words that, once you spent time with the work and the people behind it, felt less like a curatorial statement and more like a diagnosis of what it actually costs to keep making art in a city like Lagos.
Shonubi is not new to this work. Before We Go Again, he had already curated six exhibitions through Art Roots Gallery, the space he runs with a small group of partners dedicated to nurturing young contemporary artists. The trail runs back several years: Run Through Walls in 2023, in collaboration with Paschal Ugwu and Tobiloba Fasilejo; Second Before Happiness, also in 2023, in collaboration with Omolade Ogundimu, Ikechukwu and Moses Ndubuzo; Lights Out, a 2024 art installation by Femi Fala staged as an Art Roots Gallery show; and The Grid, a collection from 2025.
We Go Again is his sixth show and, within this history, the first that belongs to him alone rather than the gallery. He told us it began, almost implausibly, as a dream.“I saw this thing in my dream,” he said, describing a night in January when he fell asleep and woke up having already attended the exhibition. The crowd, the art, even the title, were fully formed in his mind. Within months, that dream had a name, a date and eight artists willing to trust him with it.
What struck us most was not the mysticism of the origin story, but the intention behind it.
Shonubi was not interested in showcasing artists who had already arrived. He wanted the ones still finding their footing: friends from childhood, artists he had been watching quietly for years, people whose work he believed deserved a larger room.
“You’ve been in your shell for so long,” he told us he said to them. “I’m going to bring you to the limelight.”
He is already planning a second edition, with hopes of featuring artists like Chubi L and an underground sculptor known as Mr. Legends. It is proof that We Go Again was never meant to be a one-off. The idea is for it to return every year, each time with a new group of artists ready to step outside whatever comfort, or discomfort, they are currently sitting in.
For some of the artists, that act of stepping out was deeply personal.
Philip Udeka’s story, for instance, was less about starting something new than returning to something he had walked away from. A full-time designer, Udeka had not made art in nearly three years before this show. It was also his first exhibition in Lagos. His previous show had taken place in New York, one he was not even physically present for.
The centrepiece of his collection was a 2022 piece titled Still Waiting For You, a portrait of a woman that he described as his jumping-off point back into practice.
The work explores a particular, unnamed stage of grief: not the sharp edge of loss, but the long, quiet middle. The waiting. The stillness. The slow feeling of something inside you depreciating with time.
Two more recent pieces, Holding Me Down and Daydreaming, both completed just weeks before the exhibition in June and July of this year, extend that same emotional thread.
In Holding Me Down, a woman holds a flower, an image Udeka uses deliberately. For him, grief is “an ever-blossoming flower”: beautiful, tied to memory and undeniably heavy to carry.
Daydreaming, by contrast, captures someone caught mid-stare, their mind somewhere else. It is the kind of blankness most people recognise but rarely admit to.
When asked about his favourite piece from his broader body of work, Udeka pointed to Find Your Wings, an animated piece from 2021. It was a small but telling detail. Even the work he loves most comes from before the three-year silence he is only now breaking.
Standing in front of his three newest canvases, it was hard not to notice how closely his story mirrored the exhibition’s own theme.
A man who stopped, and is now visibly starting again.
Johaan Martin arrived at the exhibition from a different kind of beginning. Her entry point into the body of work was almost accidental, sparked by a single photograph she came across of an older woman DJing. The image stayed with her simply because, in her words, it looked cool.
She reimagined the woman in Nigerian attire, making the image feel more familiar and more her own, then posted it on Twitter.
It performed well.
From there, an entire series was born: older Nigerian women caught in the act of doing something delightfully unconventional.
The exhibition marked Martin’s first time showing physical work. Her only previous exhibition, in February, had been a digital screen inside the +234 space, cycling through images without a fixed spot of her own. It was easy to miss if you were not paying attention.
Standing in front of her framed pieces at We Go Again, visible and fully claimed, felt like its own quiet act of renewal.
For Ayomide Popoola, the idea of starting again took a more emotionally exposed form. Their collection was built around intimacy, obsession and the strange, specific fear of being observed.
The first piece, The Watcher, depicts two people kissing, unaware of a figure spying on them through binoculars. Popoola told us the scene was drawn directly from personal experience: that particular itch of feeling watched during a private moment, even when you turn around and see no one there.
The second, titled Limerence, takes its name from the psychological term for obsessive romantic infatuation. It explores the ache of throwing pieces of yourself at a partner who is pulling away, and slowly losing yourself in the process.
Popoola described it as a face anyone could recognise in themselves, even if they would never admit it out loud.The third piece, The Phenomenal Man, came from an even more personal place.
Created in the aftermath of university, during a final year Popoola described as feeling like their life was on fire, the painting shows two dimensions at once: a composed face on the surface and, underneath it, fragments of the burn marks of everything being held back from view.
It is a piece about performing wellness while quietly falling apart, and about how that performance never fully holds.
Across the three artists we spoke to, the theme began to reveal itself in ways that felt almost too fitting to be accidental. Udeka was stepping back into practice after years away. Martin was claiming physical space for a series that began with a single tweet. Popoola was turning private ache into public confrontation.
Different stories. Different practices. Different reasons for being there.
But the same impulse to begin again.
By the time the opening weekend closed, what had started as a press assignment for LSTV Worldwide had turned into something closer to a shared exhale.
Walking through Didi Museum, what stayed with us was not just the work on the walls, but how the room felt.
There was an intimacy to We Go Again that is difficult to manufacture. Artists who clearly knew and trusted one another. Guests who lingered in front of pieces instead of simply scrolling past them. The kind of space where like-minded people find each other almost by accident.
It did not feel like a platform built to force anyone into visibility. It felt like one built for artists who were already ready to be seen and simply needed the room to do it in.
That instinct traces directly back to Shonubi himself.
Talking to him, it was clear that his ambition is not limited to spotlighting names already circulating in the right group chats. He spoke, unprompted, about wanting to bring in artists most people would not recognise: underground sculptors, quiet talents who have been perfecting their craft in obscurity, and alumni of his own circle who have never had a proper stage.
That part of his vision feels genuinely rare: a curator less interested in who is already known and more interested in who deserves to be.We Go Again is not asking its artists, or its audience, to arrive finished, it is asking them to keep returning to the work, however long the gap, however unfinished the last attempt.
If the first edition is any indication, this is a platform worth keeping an eye on. And we, for one, are already looking forward to the next edition.
Reporting for this piece was conducted on site at Didi Museum, Victoria Island, on August 28, 2026, by Ejiose Ikuenobe and Fortune Ibeh of LSTV Worldwide, London.
