Moving Parts: Yinka Bernie's Sonic Bridge Across Lagos
Yinka Bernie, Moving Parts, sound art performance, single-channel film, 2025. Courtesy of Yinka Bernie Studio.
From field recordings on Lagos bridges, ambient composition, and spatial audio engineering, Yinka Bernie composes an ambitious body of work. In his 2025 installation spread across multiple screens in a converted car park, visitors are invited to move through an immersive audio-visual architectural experience. “We wanted to build a space where sound becomes something you can walk into,” said Yinka Bernie. “Lagos is loud, layered, and alive. This exhibition holds a mirror to that energy and reimagines it.”
One attendee described it as a beautiful retrospective of Lagos’ bridges as “calm moments of caretaking and compassion”. Another noted: “We spent the day listening to Lagos in its rawest form and experiencing the essence of humanity through sound. Moving Parts reminded us that Lagos speaks, even when we’re not listening.”
The experience was held in Odeya Carpark, Onikan Lagos Island. Across its two-day run, the exhibition welcomed guests from Lagos, Abuja, Accra, Paris, London, the Netherlands, and New York. On the opening day, Yinka treated the audience to a live performance of the music score. The performance paired a double bass with live percussion and flutes, illustrating how far the artist’s sound influences stretch and how deeply the city’s multi-layered rhythms run.
In his artist’s note, Yinka states that the exhibition captures the lives of different people in Lagos through the movements and sounds made on the city’s major bridges.
Yinka Bernie, Moving Parts, single-channel film, 2025. Courtesy of Yinka Bernie Studio.
I have always been fascinated by Lagos bridges, especially pedestrian bridges. For a city that moves fast, and is filled with people in a hurry to be somewhere, these bridges quietly hold moments of pause, expression, and shared motion.
In this exhibition, each bridge becomes a passage where strangers briefly share the same rhythm, a common story told through sound. Moving Parts translates this story into an immersive environment. It contributes to a larger movement in African contemporary art; one that merges technology, experimental sound, and cultural archiving.
Yinka Bernie, Moving Parts, sound art performance, 2025. Courtesy of Yinka Bernie Studio.
This text, originally published on Yinka Bernie’s channels, has been excerpted and edited for clarity.
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