Get Guardian on GoogleZafeiri Creative Gallery, a subsidiary of Zafeiri Creative Hub, will on Sunday, November 22, 2026, open its debut exhibition, The Future Is Sweet to Have, a solo show by multidisciplinary Nigerian artist Ebube Nwaokpani.
Curated by Ikoghene Kehinde, the show is organised in collaboration with the J. Randle Centre for Yorùbá Culture & History.
The exhibition will remain on view until November 28, 2026, at the J. Randle Centre, Onikan, Lagos.
Bringing together painting, digital practice, and visual storytelling, The Future Is Sweet to Have introduces audiences to Nwaokpani’s imaginative visual world, shaped by Afrofuturism, surrealism, identity, optimism, and speculative possibility.
The exhibition considers imagination as a starting point, but not an end in itself. It argues that imagination must be followed by process, discipline, and craft. In this sense, The Future Is Sweet to Have proposes that the future is not simply inherited, predicted, or wished into existence, but imagined, disciplined, and ultimately crafted.
The exhibition takes its title from one of Nwaokpani’s works, but for Kehinde, the phrase speaks to something larger: a belief in how much goodness the future can still hold.
Kehinde said: “I believe deeply in the goodness that the future can hold. Not because the future is guaranteed to be easy, but because I believe in what can happen when imagination is supported by discipline, when talent is given opportunity, and when we are intentional about the foundations we build today. The future we are uncertain about can still be made beautiful by the habits we form in the present, the foundations we lay now, and the hope we choose to interpret.”
For Zafeiri Creative Gallery, The Future Is Sweet to Have is both an exhibition and a statement of intent. It begins with an artist imagining possibilities beyond the present and a gallery choosing to create space for those possibilities to develop. It also introduces an institutional philosophy that will continue to shape Zafeiri’s exhibition programme: a commitment to artistic development, thoughtful curation, documentation, collaboration, and encounters with art that extend beyond trends or market categories.
As Kehinde puts it: “Art deserves to be encountered before it is evaluated.”
And perhaps that is where this exhibition begins: with the possibility of looking again, imagining differently, and believing that what lies ahead can still be beautiful
