Applause erupted at the International Conference Center of the Institute of Management and Technology (IMT), Enugu.
On October 25, 2025, Segun Victor Owolabi was named Elder Ku Kalu Young Artist of the Year at the Life in My City Art Festival (LIMCAF) 2025. Her textile piece, Entanglement: Sad Generation with Happy Faces, cleverly transformed sadness into happiness – the faces smiling, and the threads quivering. For a moment, the audience was left breathless when the Obi of Onitsha, Nnemeka Alfred Ugochukwu Achebe, deliberately paused before announcing the winner, causing the applause to rise like a tide. It was a work that reads as both diagnosis and defiance – an irony that is closely woven into the country's collective fabric.
Owolabi's victory crowned a grand finale week in which the venue was transformed into a restless theater of colour, logic and conviction.
LIMCAFE – now in its 18th year – has come to embody the spirit of contemporary Nigerian art: adventurous, exploratory, endlessly self-renewing. What started as a modest regional competition in Enugu, founded by Chief Orji in 2007, has grown into the country's largest annual visual arts festival, with entries from all six geo-political zones. Its original supporters – Rokana Nigeria Limited, the French Embassy and the Alliance Française Network – helped build the platform into what soon became a national platform. By 2012, the initiative was registered as a non-profit trusteeship, Life in My City Art Initiative, ensuring that its vision could transcend personality and politics alike.
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From October 21-25, 2025, Enugu became a pilgrimage site of sorts for painters, sculptors, photographers and dreamers. The grand finale exhibition brought together the top 100 works selected from hundreds of works previously shown in regional competitions – all based on this year's provocative theme, 'Can We Breathe'? The question, half request and half challenge, resonates throughout the works: a cry against social suffocation and a metaphor for survival in uncertain times. The exhibition's curator Erasmus Onishi distilled more than 500 submissions into a single, breath-taking 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 ultimately, resilience.
Zaria's Abubakar Mohammed won the Chinelo Chime Prize for photography with E Fona Ada Na I and II, a serene diptych whose serene symmetry belies the social uneasiness beneath.
Port Harcourt's Patricia Ikele Bello won best painting/mixed media for 'At the Foot of Her Mercy', an image so tender it seemed to hum. In sculpture/installation, Mba Ukemba's Man stood like a sentinel of endurance, while Abuja's Audu Philip Iko stirred 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 sphere, Ipa Anyayole's Voices Unheard transformed the video screen into a site of reckoning, echoing the marginalized lives honored by her camera. Yola's Harry Joel Gunduri claimed Best Drawing with Hope in the Shadows, where graphite became both medium and metaphor. Two particularly impressive wins came from Enugu: Chinye Eze, whose Life Rut – gentle but tense – earned her the title of Most Creative Female Artiste; And Ogbodo Daniel, whose Trapped in Radiance won the Best Entry Award for an Artist Living with Disability, its glowing geometry suggesting a beauty stripped of constraints.
The awards at the festival shone like stars in the night: Prince David Kembukem of Port Harcourt received the Justice Anthony Aniyagolu Award for Originality; Jessie Kobol of Lagos won the Dr. Pius Okigbo Award for Technical Efficiency; While Christian Imologhome, Godspower John and Idris Sophiat Eniola shone in their regional categories.
It was chaired by a wise jury – Dr. Anthony Izuchikwu Imodi (Chairman), Dapo Adeniyi, Chinedu Ogakwu, Nneka Odoh, and Prof. Adele Garcida – who bore the delicate burden of transforming abundance into a hierarchy of excellence.
For the six top winners, the recognition comes with both a prize and a horizon: an all-expenses-paid two-week residency at the Dakar Biennale (Dak'Art) in Senegal, Africa's most prestigious contemporary art gathering. From the intimate excitement of Enugu to the continental conversation of Dakar, it is a leap both symbolic and worthy – a step from promise to presence.
The story of LIMCAFE is one of art as well as patience. Over the years, it has weathered economic downturns, changing politics, and even a pandemic that forced the festival to go online in 2020 — yet the flame has endured. What keeps it alive is probably its roots in the community. Each year, thousands of young artists present work, participate in workshops, and meet with mentors who were once contestants themselves. It is this cycle of renewal – art begetting art – that has transformed LIMCAF from a program to an institution. For many people, this is the first rung on the ladder of visibility; For others, a rare opportunity to be seen not through the eyes of the market, but through the eyes of the nation.
And through it all, Enugu retains its centrality – not as a backdrop, but as a beating heart. The city's long artistic lineage, stretching back from the Nsukka School to the present day, gives Limcafe a quiet gravitas. It's fitting that, here, young artists find their voice even as they grapple with the same questions that plague generations past: how to live, how to create, how to breathe.
When Owolabi was declared the winner under the stage on Saturday night, thunderous applause rose from more than one hall. It was as if the entire community – artists, patrons and audiences – exhaled in shared recognition of the stubborn persistence of art. His expression, torn between exhaustion and disbelief, reflects what Limcafe has always stood for: the moment when creation triumphs over obstruction, and imagination refuses to suffocate.
However, 18 years later, the festival remains just as its founders hoped – a place for discovery, renewal and a collective breath. In a country that often struggles with its contradictions, Limcaf's continued heartbeat is a quiet triumph. Here, art is not an escape; It makes existence visible – the pulse of the country is presented in colour, soil and light.
