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Sculpture Installation
Fibreglass, Lead, Cathedral Stained Glass
Dennis Osadebe
2025
In Lagos, a familiar sight punctuates the city’s streets: clusters of white monobloc chairs arranged facing preachers, projectors, or TV screens, marking the temporary boundaries of street church services, where the urban landscape bends to accommodate inhabitants’ spiritual pursuits. Cheap, durable, and endlessly mobile, the monobloc chair represents a form of democratic design shaped by industrial efficiency rather than artisanal craft.
In MASS (Devotion), Dennis Osadebe transforms this ordinary object into a site of reflection through a new process of Re-compose. Each chair is reimagined with a stained-glass piece patterned with constellations, instigating a tension between the ethereal and the industrial. The stained glass recalls the role of light in cathedrals as a spiritual medium, while the constellation patterns speak to navigation and orientation.
Presented at ART X Lagos 2025, in line with the fair’s theme Imagining Otherwise, No Matter the Tide, MASS (Devotion) is fabricated in fiberglass and reconfigured into a circular, upright installation that assumes a surreal presence. The formation evokes the grammar of devotion itself: the prayer circle, the congregation, and an architectural logic of framing perspective. It invites audiences to encounter art beyond the conventional limits of the fairground—within liminal zones where reflection, gathering, and reimagination take root.