LG and Chidi Nwaubani Reimagine African Heritage at Investec Cape Town Art Fair

At this year’s Investec Cape Town Art Fair, tradition did not sit quietly behind glass — it responded to touch. Inside the Cape Town International Convention Centre, visitors gathered around what appeared to be reimagined ogene gongs, instruments deeply rooted in Nigerian Igbo culture. But these were no ordinary artefacts. They were wired. Conductive. Waiting.

The installation, titled Mbari Memorial: What Cannot Be Returned Must Be Reconceived, came out of a collaboration between LG Electronics South Africa and multidisciplinary artist Chidi Nwaubani — and quietly became one of the fair’s most talked-about works.

A response to “Listen”

The 2026 edition was built around the theme “Listen.” Drawing on the Igbo Mbari tradition — where communities collectively build sacred structures, then leave them to decay as a reflection of life’s impermanence — Nwaubani reinterpreted communal creation for a digital age.

When several visitors touched the conductive gongs at the same time, they completed an electrical circuit. That contact generated a digital sculpture, projected in augmented form onto LG OLED screens. Each sculpture was unique, existed briefly, then dissolved.

This installation was a direct challenge to the traditional ‘do not touch’ museum mandate.

“By using LG’s OLED screens as a canvas, we transformed digital artefacts from static museum pieces into living, variable entities created through communal touch,” Nwaubani said. “Presenting this work on African soil was a visceral homecoming — asserting that our culture lives on through our collective power to recreate and reconceive what was once lost.”

Cultural resurrection through re-creation

The OLED panels — known for deep blacks and vivid contrast — gave the sculptures dimensional weight, embedding them in physical space and blurring the line between archive and body, memory and material.

The work earned Nwaubani the Tomorrows/Today Prize, supported by Fiera Milano Exhibitions Africa — a recognition reserved for emerging innovators pushing boundaries in contemporary art. As founder of Looty, the platform advocating the return of looted African artefacts, he threads that mission through Mbari Memorial: less about physical restitution than cultural resurrection through re-creation.

It asked its audience to listen, to touch, and to build something together — even if only for a moment.