Nigeria Re-Envisioned Art Exhibition: Ife Olowu Shines in Helsinki, Finland

Helsinki’s REDI has become an unexpected home for a powerful group art exhibition exploring the beauty, complexity, and resilience of Nigeria.

At Vapaakaupungin Olohuone, REDI Kalasatama, Helsinki, visitors are greeted not by the familiar grey skies of a Finnish spring, but by the vivid, complex, and deeply human landscape of Nigeria. Nigeria Re-Envisioned, a group art exhibition running from May 3 to May 25, 2024, arrives in Finland with the force of a continent demanding to be seen on its own terms.

The exhibition is part of the broader PARC Project — an initiative implemented by the Deaconess Foundation (Diakonissalaitos) and Filantropia ry, with funding from the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland. It is curated by Art for Business, a platform dedicated to using creative arts to inform, educate, and shed light on daily challenges in emerging economies.

Together, these organisations have created a space that is at once an art exhibition, an educational encounter, and a cultural bridge stretching from Lagos to Helsinki.

“Nigeria Re-Envisioned does not romanticise nor sensationalise — it simply looks, with honesty and care, at a nation in perpetual motion.”

Among the featured artists is Ife Olowu, whose contribution blurs the boundary between the physical and the digital. Olowu presents Augmented Reality art pieces — Metamorphosis and Coloured Reality — that literally come alive when viewed through a mobile device.

A figure in a vivid, band-wrapped headpiece stares back from the canvas with quiet authority; point a phone at the painting, and the static image breathes. It is a fitting metaphor for the exhibition’s thesis: Nigeria, too, is more than what first meets the eye.

The works on display span photography, painting, and sculpture, offering multiple lenses through which Nigeria’s layered identity is examined. Archival black-and-white photographs recall a Lagos of an earlier era — its skyline, its women, its quiet dignity in motion. Sculptural works fashioned from salvaged materials speak to a tradition of ingenuity born from necessity. Photographs of labourers against dusty, luminous horizons carry the weight of lives lived fully, often invisibly.

Perhaps the most talked-about highlight of the PARC Project events surrounding the exhibition is a custom-made collaborative painting created by Ife Olowu in partnership with Tunde Onakoya — founder of Chess in the Slums Africa, the viral chess advocate whose 60-day chess marathon in Times Square captured the world’s attention.

The painting was produced to raise funds for charity, channeling the spirit of Onakoya’s mission: that every child, regardless of background, deserves access to education, opportunity, and hope. The collaboration signals something important — that Nigerian artists and activists abroad are finding new, unexpected ways to amplify their work and causes on the international stage.

Nigeria Re-Envisioned is free and open to all residents of Finland throughout its run, a deliberate choice that removes barriers and invites the curious to step in from the cold and into a conversation that is long overdue.

The exhibition closes on May 25, 2024. Details and artist information can be found at www.artforbusiness.eu.

Exhibition Details

Dates: May 3–25, 2024
Venue: Vapaakaupungin Olohuone, REDI Kalasatama
Address: Hermannin rantatie 5, 00580 Helsinki
Entry: Free for all Finland residents