In Locutions: Fragments out of a Deluge, Chukwudubem Ukaigwe builds an exhibition around the question of containment: what things carry, what they cannot, and what leaks through regardless. A deluge is the feeling of being overwhelmed by too much at once: too much history, too much city, too much sound, too much knowing. This exhibition is a fragment of that. A cross-section. The part that spills over. 

Ukaigwe works across paint, ceramics, sound, video, and printmaking, treating making itself as a form of listening. The ceramic vessels at the centre of this exhibition were built by stacking bowl on top of bowl, adhered together with clay slip. Their surfaces swell and crack open, and cone shapes burst from their rims like interrupted speech. They are shaped the way communities are shaped: by pressure, by accumulation, by the decision to keep building on top of and around each other. 

These vessels hold sound. Microphones nestled within their hollow interiors let noise overflow like a fountain. The sounds were commissioned from Ukaigwe’s siblings in Lagos, who were invited to listen to their city differently. They captured everyday sounds. From market negotiations and communal debates to the rain and the many non-human voices of a city that never stops composing. What they brought was not nostalgia but something more precise: a record of a place shaped by its own histories, its frequencies of joy, its ways of being together in public.  

The vessels sit atop collected furniture. A wooden desk, table, chairs, spinning wheel, and butter churner, all locally sourced and once discarded, are not props. They are prompts. Objects that have outlived their owners and arrive here carrying the quiet weight of time and care. The vessels rest on them like offerings. Or conversations. Or archives. 

The black and yellow ceramics are the colour of Lagos buses, and the stations where they gather are where social and political life plays out. Here the vessels are the transportation, and the Gallery becomes the destination: where sound, object, memory, and overflow all arrive together. 

Locution means utterance: a style of speaking, the grain of a voice. How does a vessel annotate the voices it cannot contain. What does the furniture hold between one life and the next. What makes a city, and what parts of it resist being carried. The utterances of all these things together form a cacophony, a deluge of history, of place, of form still being learned.