Presented by SMO Contemporary Art at ARAMI in Lagos, Chika Idu’s expansive solo exhibition transforms water from a site of childhood play and everyday necessity into a charged space where environmental degradation, migration, memory, the Atlantic slave trade and the possibility of freedom converge.
In Lagos, the phrase “pure water” belongs to everyday life. It refers to the small plastic sachets of drinking water consumed by millions across Nigeria: inexpensive, accessible and essential. Yet once emptied, the same sachets accumulate along roadsides, clog drainage systems and enter rivers and waterways.
Nigerian artist Chika Idu takes that contradiction—between purity and pollution, necessity and waste—as the conceptual starting point for Pure Water, his new solo exhibition presented by SMO Contemporary Art at ARAMI in Lekki Phase One, Lagos.
Open to the public from 5 September through 30 November 2026, the exhibition brings together paintings, watercolours, drawings, collage works and portraits in which African women, children and submerged figures inhabit worlds suspended somewhere between lived reality and imagined possibility.
But Pure Water quickly becomes about much more than pollution.
Across the exhibition, water functions simultaneously as environment, material, passage, archive and metaphor. It carries memories of childhood and ecological vulnerability, but also histories of forced migration across the Atlantic and contemporary journeys undertaken in search of another life. The result is an exhibition in which bodies seem to move not only through water, but through different histories.
Beneath the surface
Idu’s swimmers initially appear to inhabit an almost idyllic universe. Bodies float beneath luminous surfaces. Children move freely through clear water. Light fractures around them while thick, layered gestures produce the sensation of currents shifting across the canvas.
The serenity is deliberate—and deceptive.
Idu’s artistic process includes observing and sketching children playing in polluted waterways. In the paintings, however, he refuses simply to reproduce those environmental conditions. He relocates his subjects into clear, seemingly pristine water, effectively transforming painting into a space where another environment can be imagined.
This distinction is central to Pure Water. The clean water does not erase the polluted landscape from which the images originate. Its purity makes the absence of pollution more conspicuous.
Professor Frank A. O. Ugiomoh, the independent scholar and retired Professor of History of Art and Theory at the University of Port Harcourt who contributes an extended critical essay to the exhibition catalogue, describes the contradiction as one in which reality and hope remain intertwined. The remembered environment becomes an imagined environment, while that imagined space retains the memory of why transformation was necessary in the first place.
Idu therefore does something more complicated than documenting an environmental problem. He asks viewers to consider what the environment might become.
The question underlying these paintings is not simply what polluted water looks like, but who is entitled to clean water, safe environments, play, movement and freedom.
The irony inside the title
That question returns viewers to the exhibition’s title.
“Pure water” may promise cleanliness, but the phrase also invokes one of the most ubiquitous forms of single-use plastic in Nigerian cities. Sachets provide drinking water to millions, yet discarded packaging can clog drains and waterways and contribute to the environmental pressures experienced by urban, coastal and riverine communities.
Idu does not treat the sachet as a straightforward villain. Its contradiction is precisely what makes it useful: it represents both access and environmental cost.
The exhibition’s critical framework expands this tension further. Ugiomoh reads Idu’s work through what he calls the “Python’s Eye”, an approach concerned with layered time, memory and the coexistence of multiple meanings within a single image. Within that reading, a swimmer can embody childhood pleasure without ceasing to evoke vulnerability; pristine water can represent possibility while retaining the memory of pollution.
The surface of the painting itself participates in this instability.
Idu builds currents through layers of palette-knife gestures and materials, producing surfaces that appear to refract and disturb light. Rather than merely illustrating water, his gestures begin to behave like it: moving, obscuring and revealing the bodies beneath.
His distinctive handling of paint emerges from a longstanding fascination with the interaction between light and atmosphere. Born in 1974 in Umunede, Delta State, Idu studied painting at Auchi Federal Polytechnic in Edo State, graduating in 1998. His practice has become recognised for dense textures and hazy, diffused surfaces—an approach he describes as “light against visual distortion.”
In Pure Water, that language finds an especially fitting subject.
From Lagos to Martinique
Yet the exhibition’s water does not remain within Nigeria.
A visit by Idu to Martinique became important to the development of the project, pushing his thinking from environmental concerns toward the much longer history of movement across the Atlantic.
On the Caribbean island, Idu encountered monuments and memorials connected to colonial history and slavery. The experience prompted him to consider the Atlantic not simply as geography, but as a repository of human histories: forced journeys during the transatlantic slave trade alongside contemporary stories of African migrants crossing oceans in pursuit of opportunity and safety.
Suddenly, the submerged body acquires another possible reading.
Water can signify play and liberation, but oceans have also separated families, transported enslaved people, carried migrants and become sites of death. The same element capable of sustaining life can consume it.
Idu does not collapse these histories into one another. Instead, the exhibition allows them to coexist.
As Ugiomoh observes, those lost during the slave trade, contemporary migrants and the women and children appearing in Idu’s paintings belong to distinct experiences, but enter a broader history of “movement, displacement, vulnerability, and the search for freedom.”
The sea consequently becomes an archive.
It remembers crossings, departures and deaths while remaining an active route through which people continue to move.
In Idu’s paintings, however, Black bodies are not reduced to symbols of historical suffering. They swim. They float. They look back. They occupy space. The exhibition imagines them as subjects capable of movement and possibility rather than bodies permanently confined by histories imposed upon them.
That distinction gives Pure Water much of its emotional force.
Women, children and the returned gaze
Away from the underwater scenes, Idu’s portraits of women and children introduce another form of confrontation.
Their power resides largely in their gaze.
The figures can appear composed, playful, intimate, questioning or determined, but they rarely function as passive subjects. They look outward, creating an exchange between sitter and spectator.
This concern extends beyond portraiture into Idu’s collage works. Here, newspaper clippings are incorporated into the compositions as references to contemporary social issues affecting women and children, allowing fragments of public events and media narratives to enter the intimate space of the artwork.
The newspaper material changes the way the works operate. What might initially appear as abstraction, mark-making or portraiture is interrupted by traces of the contemporary world. The subjects are therefore situated not outside society but firmly within it, surrounded by the pressures, debates and realities recorded in the daily news.
Rather than presenting women and children solely through vulnerability, however, Idu continually preserves their agency. The exhibition’s subjects exist within social, ecological, historical and political pressures while retaining imagination, movement, determination and hope.
The Boy Named Happy, 2026, 120 x 90 cm, Mixed media on Canvas By Chika Idu Courtesy of the artist and SMO Contemporary Art
‘The Boy Called Happy’ and painting as release
One work introduces a particularly personal dimension to this exploration.
In The Boy Called Happy, Idu departs noticeably from the controlled visual language associated with many of the exhibition’s other paintings. The artist has described creating the work as deeply therapeutic, a process through which he was able to release and articulate considerable frustration.
That emotional intensity can be felt in its physical construction.
The strokes become more urgent. Scribbles interrupt the image. Marks accumulate with an expressive freedom that distinguishes the work from the more atmospheric surfaces elsewhere in Pure Water. Instead of using painting primarily to simulate submerged light or flowing currents, Idu allows gesture itself to become emotional evidence.
It reveals another dimension of the exhibition: art not simply as observation or social commentary, but as an instrument through which the artist processes experience.
The title, The Boy Called Happy, gains an additional tension in that context. Happiness is not necessarily represented as a straightforward emotional condition. Against the energy, frustration and release contained in the marks, it becomes something more complicated—a state sought, remembered, performed or perhaps reclaimed through the very act of making.
This capacity to move between the personal and the political runs throughout Pure Water. An environmental observation can lead toward questions of inequality. A child playing in water can carry memories of an artist’s own childhood. A scribble can become an emotional release. An ocean can hold centuries of history.
A substantial new body of work
The scale of the exhibition allows Idu to explore that visual vocabulary across markedly different formats and media.
Among the major paintings reproduced in the exhibition catalogue is the monumental Catharsis (Triptych) (2026), comprising three oil-on-canvas panels measuring 210 by 150 centimetres each. Bodies appear dispersed across an expansive underwater environment, their movements almost merging with Idu’s turbulent painterly surface.
There is also Convergence (Diptych) (2022–25), with two 150-by-120-centimetre panels, alongside works including Connecting Current (2026), Hold and Hold II (2026), A Familiar Place (2026) and the 180-by-150-centimetre The Blue Quiet (2026).
At a more intimate scale, the Fluid works reduce the format to 50 by 37 centimetres, concentrating attention on individual bodies seemingly caught between immersion and emergence.
The exhibition also includes delicate watercolours on paper alongside drawings and the collage works incorporating newspaper clippings. The catalogue identifies a dedicated watercolour section that includes works such as 2 of a Kind (2026), Spectators (2023) and Nwa Baba (2023).
These shifts in scale and material matter. Large canvases invite viewers into an environment; smaller works make the experience of suspension more concentrated and bodily, while collage allows the outside world—through printed news and contemporary events—to penetrate the painted surface.
Throughout them, Idu’s water never entirely settles.
‘From Shore to Studio’: extending the exhibition into film
Painting is not the exhibition’s only medium.
Pure Water is accompanied by the short film From Shore to Studio, made by filmmaker Chichi Uzuegbu-Ikpeama for SMO Contemporary Art. The film follows Idu as he observes and documents coastal life before returning to his studio, creating a bridge between the environments that inform the project and their eventual transformation into artworks.
Uzuegbu-Ikpeama and Sandra Mbanefo Obiago, Founder and Artistic Director of SMO Contemporary Art, have worked together for more than two decades documenting and sharing African stories from African perspectives through film. That longstanding collaboration gives the film an importance beyond its function as exhibition documentation. It becomes part of a wider commitment to building visual archives around African artists, environments and cultural histories from within the continent.
The film also reveals an aspect of Idu’s process that can be difficult to discern from the finished paintings alone: the extensive looking, recording and inhabiting of environments that takes place before the work reaches the canvas.
For Obiago, the relationship between film and visual art is fundamental to SMO. She notes that the platform has its roots in both disciplines, allowing an exhibition such as Pure Water to immerse audiences in Idu’s visual world while simultaneously showing how that world is constructed.
Why ARAMI matters
The choice of exhibition venue gives Pure Water another layer of resonance.
Rather than a conventional white-cube gallery, the exhibition unfolds at ARAMI, a fine-dining restaurant in Lekki Phase One, Lagos. The venue’s relationship to the surrounding city and its waterways makes it particularly relevant to Idu’s subject.
From ARAMI’s rooftop, according to director Diana Nwandu, visitors can see both the Atlantic Ocean and the lagoon and waterways winding through Lagos. The physical geography outside the exhibition therefore echoes the water occupying Idu’s canvases inside it.
It creates a compelling relationship between artwork and city.
A visitor can encounter Idu’s imagined clear waters while standing within a metropolis where water is simultaneously resource, landscape, infrastructure and environmental concern.
SMO’s decision to work within such a setting also reflects its wider exhibition model. Based in Lagos, the art platform regularly presents modern and contemporary African and diasporic art in conventional and unconventional spaces connected to design, fashion and hospitality, seeking audiences beyond the established gallery circuit.
That unconventional approach is particularly effective here. Pure Water does not ask audiences to think about ecology from an isolated cultural space. It places art within a lived social environment, while the Atlantic, lagoon and Lagos waterways remain geographically present beyond the walls.
Water as a possibility
What ultimately makes Pure Water compelling is Idu’s refusal to make water signify only one thing.
It can be polluted and pristine.
It can imprison and liberate.
It can hold childhood memories while carrying the historical weight of slavery and colonialism.
It can separate Africa from the Caribbean while connecting their histories.
And it can be the route through which contemporary migrants pursue freedom while simultaneously becoming the environment that threatens their survival.
The catalogue’s closing argument captures the complexity: beneath its apparently “pure” surface, Idu’s water contains bodies, materials, environments, memories and multiple histories. The polluted present, remembered past and possibility of a different future are allowed to occupy the same image.
That may be the most productive way to understand Pure Water. Idu is not painting an escape from reality so much as testing what painting can do to reality.
Children who begin in polluted waterways are given clean water. Bodies burdened by historical associations are allowed to float. Newspaper fragments bring contemporary anxieties directly into the picture plane. In The Boy Called Happy, frustration itself becomes gesture. An object as ordinary as a discarded drinking-water sachet opens questions about access, inequality and environmental responsibility. And an ocean carrying some of the most painful histories of the African diaspora is simultaneously reclaimed as a space in which another kind of freedom might be imagined.
The water is beautiful.
But beneath its beauty, it remembers.
Exhibition details
Chika Idu: Pure Water
Presented by: SMO Contemporary Art
Venue: ARAMI, Lekki Phase One, Lagos, Nigeria
Dates: 5 September – 30 November 2026
The exhibition includes paintings, watercolours, drawings, collage works and portraits, and is accompanied by From Shore to Studio, a short film by Chichi Uzuegbu-Ikpeama documenting Idu’s engagement with coastal environments and his studio practice.
Readers can explore the exhibition and additional works through the SMO Contemporary Art website.
