January 23, 2026 |
Larry Li’s What’s a Dragon to a Dragon holds power in suspension: figures face off without spectacle, the work leaning on inheritance and hierarchy rather than fantasy. Adeshola Makinde’s That Fire Next Time II Red Orange (2025) is dense and heat-heavy, its scorched palette pressing urgency into the surface. Yiqing Lei’s Hollow Woman 空心女人 (2022) pares the body back to something emptied out, where absence becomes the subject. These works sit among the 30 pieces included in Future Tense, a new online exhibition from digital art discovery platform Myma, curated by Lagos-born, London-based artist Leonard Iheagwam, aka Soldier.
Debuting today, Future Tense marks Myma’s first-ever guest-curated exhibition, and a significant shift for the platform. Until now, its programme has been shaped by professional curators; this time, an artist takes the lead. For Myma, it’s a way of charging creatives with curating, collaborating and shaping conversations directly. For Soldier, it’s an opportunity to ask a deceptively simple question. “What is the future?” he posits.
Soldier’s own practice spans painting, sculpture, fashion and skate culture, often circling the same nuanced pressure points: identity politics, family dynamics, the psychic residue of war, the force of intention. This interdisciplinary outlook feeds directly into how he approached the show. “Because it lets me see people for who they are,” he says. “I kind of go between different mediums so [that] I can have an eye out for artists versed in different mediums and all the different ways they express themselves.”
Rather than defaulting to familiar images of futurity – silver cities, gleaming machines, end-of-days catastrophes – Soldier was clear about what he didn’t want. “When I talk about ‘futuristic’, I’m not talking about flying robots and cars in that respect,” he says. “I wanted to see how people translate what the world could be – almost very speculative, but the work just had to speak to me in a very futuristic way whilst also having natural synergy.” The result is a group of artists whose works consider the future through lived experience rather than a fixed aesthetic.
That emphasis on experience is rooted in Soldier’s own history. Born in Lagos and now based in London, he has shown internationally, including at Frieze, and has collaborated with brands such as Louis Vuitton, Nike, Timberland and Hublot. His perspective, as Myma notes, is “rooted in lived experience,” which makes him “a natural fit for a show that refuses the usual language of ‘the future’.” It’s also a perspective shaped early on by looking sideways at culture. Asked about his first encounters with art, Soldier points to mass media as much as museums. “My entry points came from media I was consuming with my friends,” he says, citing Andy Warhol, Rita Ackermann and Damien Hirst, before noting how his interests have shifted: “now I really admire artist such as Cady Noland and I think that’s come with a sort of mental switch in practice and what I’m now exposed to at the moment.”
The collaboration with Myma emerged just as organically. “I guess it came about very naturally and casually,” Soldier explains. “When [my solo exhibition] Black Star came out [last year], I think it just spurred so many people to have conversations about the future and what it holds… we came together and decided that we wanted to see what the future meant to other artists and how they could convey it.” Myma, he adds, “was the perfect partner for that because it allowed me to see works by artists I would have never come across before.”
The exhibition brings together artists from across the world working in painting, sculpture, illustration and mixed media. Alongside Li, Makinde and Lei, key works include Moyosore Briggs’ Prevail (Self Portrait) (2021), which Soldier singles out as personally resonant and Yulia Lavrova’s Where Do We Go? (2024), a work that leans into uncertainty rather than resolution. The diversity isn’t incidental; it’s central to the point. “It was essentially picking artists who fit certain descriptions and finding people who had such a fresh futuristic taste of their works,” Soldier says.
That openness led to genuine surprise. “Many people surprised me because we kept the brief quite open, meaning that personal interpretation came into play,” he says. “I was quite surprised [by] how some people can think about the future being so far ahead versus some people interpreting the future as tomorrow.” That slippage in timescale is where Future Tense finds its footing. Some works speculate decades ahead; others feel firmly rooted in the present tense.
The exhibition text notes that Future Tense “posits ways in which future is refracted by utopic ideals,” a line Soldier is keen to unpack. “When you look at the world right now, it feels like we’re at a tipping point,” he says. “If we’re not careful, what looks like progress could easily slide into dystopia.” Conflict, nationalism, racism and a lack of empathy shape the backdrop of the show, even when they aren’t explicitly depicted. For Soldier, reflecting those pressures is part of the job: “As an artist, my role is to reflect that and explore the warnings.”
Importantly, Future Tense resists the idea of a single, authoritative vision of what’s to come. “I know I have my own way of seeing how the future looks, but that’s my reality,” Soldier says. “So I think the group show responds to people giving their own take on what they think the future is.” That collective approach reframes futurity as something shared, contested and unresolved.
For Myma, the exhibition also signals where the platform is heading: artist-led, culturally critical and tuned into audiences who move between contemporary art, fashion, skate and online culture. For viewers, it offers something quieter but more demanding than spectacle. This exhibition isn’t about aesthetics; it’s about lived experiences translated into art and about giving artists space to think forward on their own terms. As Soldier puts it, “I really hope that when the artists were creating these pieces it allowed them to think about what the future is and how they could impact it through their art and other means.”
Photography courtesy of Myma. Discover ‘Future Tense’ online here.
Leonard ‘Soldier’ Iheagwam
