Attending 'Dreaming New Worlds' is like stepping into a surreal episode of Doctor Who, where, instead of a red phone booth, you walk into Lagos’s Old Government Printing Press—a vintage building still marked by history despite its fresh yellow paint—and are transported into a space of futuristic wonder. Inside, the colonial exterior gives way to an immersive world of pulsing lights, sleek installations, and cascading visuals that feel as if you've entered a spaceship.
From the moment you step inside, it’s clear that this ambitious, multisensory exhibition is as much about reimagining the African experience as it is about exploring the boundaries of art, science, and technology. Dreaming New Worlds takes you through an experience that unites memory, culture, and visions of a futuristic Lagos. The choice of venue—a colonial-era building—ties memory to place, with the historical structure acting as a physical representation of heritage, while the dazzling, futuristic installations within symbolize the culture and technological promise of tomorrow.
Upon entry, visitors are attracted by the lights from the Installation titled "Totem" The installation is made up of an array of long, glowing tubes etched with Nsibidi(accient writing from Eastern Nigeria) and Chinese characters, positioned to create a pathway illuminated by fragments of light and language. The lights flicker, drawing the eye along a directed path, underscoring the fusion of African and global symbols. This notable installation by the collective- Chronoverse, reflects on Lagos's unique economic and community-building practices, examining Nigeria’s igba boi system, a traditional mentorship-driven economic model, alongside similar communal principles in Chinese culture. Through pulsating light totems and symbolic screens, it showcases how collective support can underpin community growth and shared prosperity, offering a futuristic lens on these economic traditions.
Near the entrance, Pidgin Choreography by Alexandra Martinez Serrano, features two digital screens that draw inspiration from public digital installations common in Nigerian urban spaces, reframing them as atomic structures. This work, at once scientific and metaphorical, uses the atom to explore knowledge transmission, human connectivity, and the resilience of storytelling across generations. Serrano’s piece invites visitors to consider how information—whether encoded in atoms or social communities—remains bound across distances, bridging past and present across Africa’s cultural landscape.
The final installation, Memorium by another collective called Source Code, envelops visitors in a sound-and-light-scape where memories flicker and fade on massive digital screens, inspired by Edward Thorndike's decay theory. Here, fragmented images of past Nigerian landscapes and cultural emblems appear, dissolve, and re-emerge, symbolizing the fluidity of memory in a digital age. Memorium speaks to the vulnerability of collective memory under the forces of modernization, as the colonial history of Lagos presses upon the present moment, revealing layers of time woven into the city’s infrastructure.
The curatorial design of Dreaming New Worlds magnifies this dialogue between past and future, physically grounding viewers in an old building while surrounding them with speculative, sci-fi-like environments. Carefully positioned installations in shadowed rooms, illuminated by strobing lights and kinetic sculptures, make the gallery feel like a cultural and temporal portal. The space feels intentionally curated, with artworks leading the viewer intuitively from one idea to the next, evoking a journey through the exhibition’s key themes of connection, transformation, and continuity.
The artists in Dreaming New Worlds use a blend of digital projections, interactive screens, lights, and sculptural forms to bridge the tangible and intangible, transforming themes of memory and knowledge transmission into both concrete and abstract forms. Serrano’s atomic models, for example, beautifully parallel the layered meanings of oral histories and cultural traditions, embodying ideas like entanglement and superposition that echo the depth and complexity of African storytelling.
Dreaming New Worlds shows how African artists are breaking boundaries at the connections of art, science, and technology. It’s a visionary presentation of heritage, memory, and futuristic possibility—leaving a lasting impression on all who step through its doors, drawn into its world of light, culture, and imaginative futures.
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