Art X Lagos: Where Nigeria's business and cultural elite collide

Wherever you may be in the world, you'd struggle to find Nigerian bank CEOs hanging out in the same space as a French-Senegalese Golden Bear winner and a handful of African gallerists. On one Thursday evening in November, that constellation of African success gathered on the grounds of the Federal Palace Hotel in Victoria Island, Lagos, for the opening of the 2025 edition of the Art X fair.

For Art X founder Tokini Peterside-Schwebig, engaging with the elite of the Nigerian business world is nothing new. Before the first edition of the fair took place, she sought sponsorship from Access Bank, then led by legendary CEO Herbert Wigwe.

She had finished an MBA at France's INSEAD, and was seeking sponsorship for an art fair in her home country. As Tokini, as she is widely called, recalls, Wigwe had two main questions.

"Why should I do this? Why should I do it with you?"

Backed by business

She told Wigwe that the platform she wanted to build was the right one "if you have ever desired to see ourselves presented on the global stage as we deserve to be".

It wasn't going to be regular art fair. She wanted something that was attuned to "our specific circumstances".

By that, she meant that didn't want a fair where "affluent people would come, sip their champagne, buy, and go home".

To make that happen, tickets were free for the first year. It was also going to be multi-disciplinary, bringing in music and other art forms.

The pitch worked. Until his premature death in a helicopter crash in 2024, Wigwe himself and his outfit, Access Bank, were major supporters of Art X. "He was the first to say yes," she says.

Since then, the fair has crafted a space in the culture so visible that it has to turn down potential sponsors because it is working with rival companies.

But back then, a recurrent question from Nigerian business leaders was the rather naïve: "What is an art fair?"

"I recognised that I could not start from 'here's my business plan, this is the equity'," Tokini says.

Instead, Art X works with its partners "from a place of branding."

Tokini Peterside-Schwebig, founder of ArtX, at the 2021 edition. (Photo by Benson Ibeabuchi / AFP) Art X showcases galleries and young talent

Times change and Access Bank were not among this year's sponsors.

But the event remains a major event in Nigeria's cultural diary and a crucial springboard for young art talent across Nigeria. Tokini says that when it comes to the galleries who pay to exhibit at Art X, quality is more important than quantity.

"The art industry here was powerful and strong in artistic talent," Tokini says, "but burgeoning in terms of the business in the arts. We could not therefore bank on the presence of 200 galleries like an Art Basel or Frieze. We wanted to work with the best and therefore with a few."

Among those exhibiting this year was Uganda's Afriart Gallery (AAG). Its director, Daudi Karungi, notes that Art X has evolved since the gallery's first appearance in 2018.

"Now, it's more selective," he says, adding that each year the gallery does "well enough to return".

Has he noticed any changes in clientele over the past few editions?

Yes, he says: the collectors' market is growing enough that "children of collectors are getting into collecting art".

Last year he noted that the daughter of a prominent personality "spent an impressive amount of money" on a work.

Galerie MAM, a gallery based in Douala, Cameroon, has been coming to Art X ever year but one since it first paid for a booth in 2018. But when, last year, Nigeria's currency experienced a steep decline against the dollar, the gallery had an internal session where it "debated" coming to Lagos.

Galerie MAM showed up still, says Mohamed Amine Cissé, its rep at Art X this year - not only because Art X has been great for business (three of their artists having sold individual pieces of around $40,000 each across different editions) but because a relationship has been formed with the organisers.

An affordable alternative

These relationships are important for the African art ecosystem. Equally important is affordability. For example, it is much more expensive for a gallery in Cameroon or Ghana to take its art pieces to London or Paris than to bring those same pieces to Lagos.

"It can be four times the price," says Cisse. Storage in Lagos could be "$100 a day; in Paris it is $500 and then you have to deal with customs again and again".

The value becomes even clearer because, unlike some other commodities, art pieces mostly have fixed prices in the global market.

But buyers of African art at Art X and elsewhere are not only from the continent. Annabelle Obiri, exhibition production manager of Ghana's Gallery 1957, says the gallery sells to a demographic mix: "Nigerian, African-American, Latin Americans, female, male".

Before the close of Art X this year, Obiri says her gallery had sold pieces that ranged from $4,500 to $19,000.

Sandra Mbanefo Obiago of Lagos-based SMO Contemporary, one of the galleries present at the first edition of Art X, puts her own buyers at "30% international and 70% African".

A person familiar with some of her gallery's transactions said that Victor Butler's Searching Scriptures, one of the highlights of the fair, had sold for above $90,000.

These numbers, of course, mean that Tokini was correct to think that there was a market for a Lagos art fair. Still, she doesn't believe that Art X's worth is solely commercial.

Ask her about numbers and she reels off non-financial data. The fair, she says, has welcomed 700,000 attendees from over 170 countries over virtual and physical editions, and has showcased over 500 African artists.

"These are the numbers that stick," she says.