DADA Gallery inaugurated its permanent Lagos home with The Beautyful Ones, a group exhibition featuring Yagazie Emezi, Sahara Longe, Silvana Mendes, Taylor Simmons, Larissa de Souza and Cameron Ugbodu. The exhibition gathers these diasporic voices, traversing mediums to consider how identity and belonging are continually remade across distance, return, and remembrance.
The title borrows from Ayi Kwei Armah’s 1968 novel The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, a searing portrait of disillusionment in post-independence Ghana. Where Armah wrote of corruption and thwarted hopes, DADA reimagines the phrase as a living affirmation: once imagined as a deferred future, The Beautyful Ones are already here, shaping new worlds in the present. Their presence is felt not only in the works on view, but in the collective gaze of those who gather around them.
At its pith, the exhibition attends to repatriation—not as a static gesture of return, but as an unfolding negotiation between homeland and elsewhere, ancestral inheritance and contemporary reimagining. Here, Lagos becomes more than a physical site: it is a node in the practice of cross-cultural imagination, a ground for fragments of diasporic life to converge, re-root, and reverberate outward.
Cultural theorist Stuart Hall reminds us that identity is not an essence but a “positioning,” a process of becoming shaped as much by rupture as by continuity. The artists in The Beautyful Ones enfold this tension: Mendes’ evocations of Afro-Brazilian visual traditions, de Souza’s reworking of cultural mythologies, Emezi’s corporeal excavations of self and environment, Simmons’ fragmentary figuration, Longe’s portraits that uphold the opacity of their subjects, and Ugbodu’s ethereal visions of ancestral memory and Black futurity. Together, they inhabit the unsettled space between dispersal and belonging.
The Beautyful Ones marks both arrival and departure: an offering to the city, and an opening toward the worlds these artists continue to shape.