Sea Never Dry Exhibition

Curatorial Statement: Sea Never Dry

Sea Never Dry takes its name from the long-term photographic series by Akinbode Akinbiyi, who since 1982 has returned to Bar Beach, Lagos, observing how its shoreline reflects the city’s shifting rhythms. His images form a rare visual archive of Lagos’s evolving relationship with the Atlantic. Through quiet gestures of walking, resting, praying, and gathering, Akinbiyi captures the beach as both a social stage and a site of contemplation. Over four decades, his photographs record the slow disappearance of this once-vibrant public ground under commercial and environmental pressures, revealing the sea not as spectacle but as witness- a repository of memory and endurance.

For much of Lagos’s modern history, Bar Beach has been a space of leisure, prayer, and commerce, but also one marked by violence and loss. Its erasure through the Eko Atlantic land reclamation project signals a shift from shared commons to privatized frontier. Sea Never Dry invites Lagosians to remember and reimagine their relationship with the coast, bringing together photography, sound, performance, film, and community-based interventions to explore how coastal identity, gentrification, and memory intersect along this charged shoreline.
The participating artists each confront the shifting coastline as a site where life and death, visibility and erasure, coexist. Their works engage a necropolitical framework, revealing how urban planning, environmental degradation, and economic inequality determine whose lives are sustained and whose are displaced. Akinbode Akinbiyi’s documentation traces the slow violence of disappearance, while Peter Okotor’s Water No Get Enemy makes audible the struggles of waterfront communities negotiating survival at the city’s edge. Christopher Nelson’s No City for Poor Men confronts the exclusions produced by capitalist urbanism, and Nengi Nelson’s Multiplicity: A Study on Play reclaims public space through gestures of freedom and movement.
Zainab Odunsi’s Kuramo Days, Kuramo Nights extends this reflection into the nightlife economy of Kuramo Beach, capturing the bars, dancers, and music that animate Lagos’s coast after dark- a space where play, performance, and survival converge. Odun Orimolade’s performance Emi Omi/ Emi Omi trails the inseparability of life and water in rhythms, vulnerabilities, and resilience within the contested landscapes of metropolitan coasts. Femi Odugbemi’s film, Bar Beach Blues introduces a cinematic elegy of postcolonial disillusionment, following intersecting lives shaped by poverty, corruption, and spiritual exhaustion. Pauline Guinard’s Where is Bar Beach again? provides a cartographic and sonic counterpoint, mapping fifteen years of transformation along Lagos’s eastern coastline.
Together, these works form a collective reckoning with the politics of space, memory, and survival. Sea Never Dry is both an homage to a vanished shore and a meditation on the power structures that continue to shape the lives tethered to it.
Commerce, Displacement, Faith, Play.

Curatorial Team
Director: Oyindamola Faithful
Curators: Emmanuel Ndefo, Mary Osaretin Omoregie
Installation: Peter Okotor, Moses Taiwo
Marketing and Social Media: Bem Victor Tilley-Gyado, Benneth Njoku, Nifemi Deji Alabi
Administrative Assistant: Amirah Egbefo