‘The Forever Now’ invites visitors into an immersive, two-room exhibition experience shaped by the communal and spiritual practices of Mbari Houses from Owerri, Nigeria. The first room introduces key themes through a series of carefully crafted objects that foreground materiality, particularly the use of termite clay—an abundant and culturally resonant medium with its warm, terracotta hue.

These objects often take anthropomorphic or symbolic forms, evoking tools of commemoration and offerings to deities. The interplay of inscription and abstraction is central, drawing from pictographic systems such as Nsibidi and Uli to explore sacred truths, everyday realities, and speculative futures. Through this, Oparanze Congress Studio proposes a deeply reflective approach to contemporary creativity—one that acknowledges ancestral languages and cosmologies.

In the second room, the exhibition transforms into an egalitarian making space, where visitors are invited to work with plasticine, paper, and other materials. This participatory environment reimagines the Mbari tradition as a living practice, allowing for collaborative expression and dialogue within a London context.

This approach draws on the writings of Herbert N. Cole’s Mbari: Art and Life Among The Owerri Igbo (1982) and Sylvester Okwunodu-Ogbechie’s essay Historical Life Of Objects: African Art History and the Problem of Discursive Obsolescence (2005). These examined the social and temporal dimensions of Mbari. For Oparanze, this is a moment to re-engage with those frameworks—recognizing the Igbo concept of a multiverse, where impermanence and multiplicity are embraced as foundational design principles. ‘The Forever Now’ is thus not only an exhibition, but a call to imagine new communal futures through making.