Breathing Art: LIMCAF 2025 crowns new generation artists in Enugu
Applause rippled through the International Conference Centre of the Institute of Management and Technology (IMT), Enugu,
on October 25, 2025, as Segun Victor Owolabi was named the Elder K.U. Kalu Young Artist of the Year at the Life In My City Art Festival (LIMCAF) 2025. His textile piece, Entanglement: Sad Generation with Happy Faces, stitched melancholy into mirth with sly precision — the faces smiling, and the threads trembling. For a moment, the audience held its breath as Nnaemeka Alfred Ugochukwu Achebe, the Obi of Onitsha, paused deliberately before announcing the winner, prompting applause to rise like a tide. It was a work that read as both diagnosis and defiance — an irony finely woven into the nation’s collective fabric.
Owolabi’s win crowned a grand finale week in which the venue was transformed into a restless theatre of colour, argument, and conviction.
LIMCAF — now in its 18th year — has come to embody the spirit of contemporary Nigerian art: bold, searching, endlessly self-renewing. What began in 2007 as a modest regional competition in Enugu, founded by Chief Orji, has evolved into the country’s largest annual visual arts festival, drawing entries from all six geopolitical zones. Its original backers — Rocana Nigeria Limited, the French Embassy, and the Alliance Française Network — helped build the scaffolding for what would soon become a national platform. By 2012, the initiative had been registered as a non-profit trusteeship, the Life In My City Art Initiative, ensuring that its vision could outlast personalities and politics alike.
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From October 21-25, 2025, Enugu became a kind of pilgrimage site for painters, sculptors, photographers, and dreamers. The grand finale exhibition gathered the Top 100 works selected from hundreds shown earlier in zonal contests — all answering to this year’s provocative theme, ‘Can We Breathe’? The question, half-plea and half-challenge, reverberated across the works: a cry against social suffocation and a metaphor for survival in uncertain times. Erasmus Onyishi, curator of the exhibition, distilled more than 500 submissions into a single, breathing body of art, arranging them as a triptych of movements — outcry, reflection, and hope. The result felt almost choreographed: an emotional arc where protest gave way to meditation, and finally, to resilience.
Abubakar Mohammed of Zaria took the Chinelo Chime Prize for Photography with E Fona A’da Na I and II, a poised diptych whose quiet symmetry belied the social unease beneath.
Patricia Ikel Bello of Port Harcourt won Best Painting/Mixed Media for At the Foot of Her Mercy, an image so steeped in tenderness it seemed to hum. In Sculpture/Installation, Mba Ukemba’s Man stood like a sentinel of endurance, while Audu Phillip Iko of Abuja coaxed optimism from clay in Yes We Can and We Will — a ceramic piece that turned the craftsman’s wheel into a circle of hope.
In the digital realm, Ipa Anyaole’s Voices Unheard turned the video screen into a site of reckoning, echoing the marginalised lives his camera honoured. Harry Joel Gunduri from Yola claimed Best Drawing with Hope in the Shadows, where graphite became both medium and metaphor. From Enugu came two especially affecting wins: Chinenye Eze, whose Life Rut — tender yet tense — earned Most Creative Female Artist; and Ogbodo Daniel, whose Trap in Radiance won Best Entry from an Artist Living with Disability, its glowing geometries suggesting beauty wrested from constraint.
The festival’s endowed prizes gleamed like constellations in the night: Prince David Kembukem of Port Harcourt received the Justice Anthony Aniagolu Prize for Originality; Jesse Kobol of Lagos took the Dr. Pius Okigbo Prize for Technical Proficiency; while Christian Imologhome, Godspower John, and Idris Sofiat Eniola shone in their regional categories.
Presiding over it all was a discerning jury — Dr. Anthony Izuchikwu Emodi (chair), Dapo Adeniyi, Chinedu Ogakwu, Nneka Odoh, and Prof. Adele Garkida — who bore the delicate burden of transforming abundance into a hierarchy of excellence.
For the six top winners, recognition comes with both reward and horizon: an all-expenses-paid two-week residency at the Dakar Biennale (Dak’Art) in Senegal, Africa’s most prestigious contemporary art gathering. From Enugu’s intimate fervour to Dakar’s continental conversation, it is a leap both symbolic and deserved — a crossing from promise to presence.
LIMCAF’s story is one of endurance as much as art. Over the years, it has weathered economic recessions, shifting politics, and even a pandemic that in 2020 forced the festival online — yet the flame held. What keeps it alive, perhaps, is its rootedness in community. Each year, thousands of young artists submit works, attend workshops, and encounter mentors who were once contestants themselves. It is this cycle of renewal — art begetting art — that has transformed LIMCAF from an event into an institution. For many, it is the first rung on the ladder of visibility; for others, a rare chance to be seen not through the market’s eye, but through a nation’s gaze.
And through it all, Enugu retains its centrality — not as a backdrop, but as a beating heart. The city’s long artistic lineage, stretching from the Nsukka School to the present day, lends LIMCAF a quiet gravitas. It is fitting that, here, young artists find their voices even as they wrestle with the same questions that have haunted generations: how to live, how to make, how to breathe.
When Owolabi was announced winner beneath the stageights that Saturday night, the applause that followed seemed to rise from more than a single hall. It was as if an entire community exhaled — artists, patrons, and spectators alike — in shared recognition of art’s stubborn persistence. His expression, caught between exhaustion and disbelief, captured what LIMCAF has always stood for: the moment when creation overcomes constraint, and imagination refuses to suffocate.
However,18 years on, the festival remains what its founders hoped it would be — a space for discovery, renewal, and collective breath. In a nation often gasping under its own contradictions, LIMCAF’s continuing heartbeat is its quiet triumph. Here, art is not escape; it is survival made visible — the country’s pulse rendered in paint, clay, and light.
