The courtyard of the National Museum of Unity was on Wednesday transformed into a living, immersive night market as The City Beneath: A Spirit Re-Memory brings together performance, sculpture, painting, sound, and augmented reality in a bold reimagining of how audiences experience cultural history and memory within museum spaces.
Designed as a multimodal installation, The City Beneath challenges the conventional idea of museums as quiet repositories where artifacts remain sealed behind glass and disconnected from the communities, rituals, and spiritual worlds they once belonged to.
Instead, the exhibition turns the museum courtyard into an active cultural environment where memory, myth, commerce, ritual, and performance intersect.
Drawing inspiration from the traditional West African night market, the installation presents the market as more than a commercial space. Within the exhibition, the night market becomes a symbolic meeting point between the visible and invisible worlds, a place where spirituality, storytelling, folklore, and communal memory coexist.
At the centre of the installation stands the “Market Tree,” envisioned as a bridge between worlds. Around it, visitors encounter layered market structures, shrines, soundscapes, and cultural objects designed to create an immersive sensory experience.
Adding a theatrical dimension to the exhibition, ten performers from the University of Ibadan descended from the museum rooftop, embodying celestial beings arriving to inhabit the market below. Their performances transform the courtyard into what the curators describe as a “living archive,” inviting audiences not only to observe but also to move through and participate within the space.
Among the featured artists, Neec Nonso presented an immersive installation exploring reincarnation and spiritual existence through nested installations hidden within enamel bowls filled with water. Using augmented reality technology, viewers activated digital narratives and images through reflective surfaces, revealing aquatic deities and unseen spiritual dimensions associated with indigenous cosmologies and night market traditions.
Bolaji Mofeyiseke examined the relationship between technology and cultural memory, using augmented reality to breathe new life into heritage objects and musical artifacts. His work explored how digital storytelling can revive nostalgia, forgotten histories, and communal experiences within contemporary museum spaces.
Meanwhile, Dikachi Ugwu worked with jute bags, materials historically tied to trade and market movement, to retell an indigenous folktale about a hunter and an antelope who transforms into a woman to become his wife. Through the narrative, themes of transformation between human, animal, and spiritual worlds are woven into the physical language of the marketplace.
The exhibition also foregrounded performance as an integral storytelling medium. Featured performers include Victoria Akpabio-Christopher, Oriade Dunamis, Awoyemi Ebenezer, Marvellous Raheem, Gift Emmanuel, Esther Oboh, Esther Olarewaju, Lekan Ogunsuada, Mfonobong Awah, and Iniobong Awah..
