Navigating Liminality: Myles Igwebuike’s The Space Between Worlds at Temple Muse

Temple Muse welcomes a profound and quietly radical voice in contemporary African art with The Space Between Worlds: A Cartography of Self, the first solo exhibition in Nigeria by multidisciplinary artist Myles Igwebuike. Running from November 6–19, 2025, the exhibition unfolds as an immersive journey into the poetics of material, memory, and identity. Rather than a conventional showcase, Igwebuike offers a meditative encounter — a slow, deliberate navigation through what he calls the “spaces in-between,” where form and feeling meet, resist, and ultimately transform.

Myles Igwebuike

Igwebuike’s practice revolves around what he describes as material intelligence: the belief that matter holds its own knowledge, histories, and temperaments. Instead of shaping materials to his will, he collaborates with them — metal that resists heat, fabric that collapses into its own folds, discarded cloth that insists on another life. This relational approach becomes the philosophical spine of the exhibition. To him, creation is neither domination nor manipulation; it is a conversation. He listens, waits, adjusts. The works that emerge carry this sense of negotiation, of co-authorship.

The exhibition itself is arranged as a constellation. Sculptures, textile pieces, paintings, and sound works hover in dialogue with one another, resisting easy categorization. Igwebuike intentionally avoids the clarity of neatly divided sections. Instead, he leans into ambiguity — the subtle tensions, the pauses, the unfinished edges that mirror the complexities of personal and collective memory. It is an atmospheric curatorial strategy that encourages viewers to drift, to discover, to absorb at their own pace.

Among the standout works is “Ụzọ Ụwa”, a painting that abstracts the urban landscape into flowing thresholds, intersections, and courtyards. It reads like a map of lived experience — an intuitive, almost bodily geography of movement and encounter. In the sculptural piece “Ụjọ”, the artist engages with the duality of fear and awe. Textures bulge, compress, and stretch in an unsettling harmony, echoing the emotional tensions that define the sublime. Meanwhile, “Kedu”, a textile work made from remnants of akwete cloth — gathered, rewoven, and reversed — functions as a meditation on renewal, fragmentation, and community. Through these works, Igwebuike gestures toward the “right to opacity” articulated by Édouard Glissant, refusing the demand for full legibility in favor of layered, living complexity.

Curator Avinash D. Wadhwani describes Igwebuike’s practice as one grounded in “radical patience,” a commitment to letting time, material, and intuition lead the way. This pacing is evident in the tactile density of each work, as well as in the silences and stillnesses woven throughout the installation. The result is an exhibition that feels not produced but grown — shaped by attention, endurance, and care.

Images of Myles Igwebuike with Guests at the opening of The Space Between Worlds: A Cartography of Self | Courtesy of Temple Muse

Though Igwebuike works between Enugu, Luanda, Fes, and London, his artistic voice is distinctly rooted while remaining globally resonant. His background as a designer, researcher, and cultural strategist, combined with his founding of the Njiko think-tank, positions him as a thinker as much as a maker — someone who interrogates heritage, urbanism, and the politics of space with intellectual rigor. His contributions to the Sharjah Architecture Triennial and the Nigerian pavilion at the 2025 London Design Biennale underscore his expanding influence.

Yet The Space Between Worlds is, above all, a homecoming. It is an offering to Lagos, a city alive with movement, reinvention, and layered histories. Through his constellation of works, Igwebuike creates a space for slowness and reflection, inviting viewers to sit with complexity rather than rush toward resolution. The exhibition is a reminder that identity is not a fixed point but an unfolding; that memory is not a straight line but a field of shifting coordinates.