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Otobong Nkanga

Otobong Nkanga’s work foregrounds ecological themes of relationality and becoming through a distilled poetics of entanglement. Her multidisciplinary practice examines the complex social, political, and material relationships between bodies, territories, minerals and the earth. Unsettling the divisions between minimal and conceptual or sensual and surreal approaches, the artist’s research-based practice constellates humans and landscapes, organic and non-organic matter, Global North and Global South economies. Through drawing, installation, performance, photography, textiles and sculpture, Nkanga creates pathways translating the natural world – its plants, herbs, minerals and living organisms – into networked, aggregated situations evoking memory, labour, home, care, ownership, emotion, touch and smell.

In addition to producing distinct and rigorously researched art objects, Nkanga has consistently broken new ground through her ambitious, long-term projects. Landversation, which toured four cities from 2014-20, puts the artist and visiting publics in dialogue with multiple local communities who have deep connections to the land; while The Carved to Flow Foundation, established in Akwa Ibom, Nigeria, on the occasion of a series of performances held at documenta 14 in 2017, is a platform dedicated to researching material cultures and fostering shared experimentation and exchange locally. These projects, and Nkanga’s practice more broadly, evidence a transhistorical and cross-cultural diversity of influences, pointing to the planetary scale of her artistic investigations. Reframing people and objects as compressed multitudes and as entities that come into being in relation to other entities, Nkanga deftly weaves insights from geology, botany, poetry and non-Western knowledge systems. Her works’ allusions to the reparative potentials of connectivity urgently gesture towards the possibility of more liveable futures.

Otobong Nkanga (born 1974, Kano, Nigeria) lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium. She studied at the Obafemi Awolowo University in Ife-Ife, Nigeria; the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and did her masters in the Performing Arts at DasArts, Advanced Research in Theatre and Dance studies in Amsterdam. Nkanga has been an artist-in-residence at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam in 2002-04, DAAD Berlin programme in 2013-14 and at the Martin Gropius-Bau in 2019.

Her most recent solo exhibitions include: MoMA, New York, USA (2024), IVAM, Valencia, Spain (2023); Frist Art Museum, Nashville, USA; Sint-Janshospitaal, Bruges, Belgium (2022); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2021); Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, Turin, Italy (2021-2022); Villa Arson, Nice, France (2021); Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Høvikodden, Norway (2020-2021);  Gropius Bau, Berlin, Germany (2020); MIMA, Middlesbrough, UK (2020); Tate St Ives, UK (2019); Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town, South Africa (2019); Ar/ge kunst Galleria Museo, Bolzano, Italy (2018); MCA Chicago, US (2018); Kunsthal Aarhus, Denmark (2017); Nottingham Contemporary, UK (2016); Beirut Art Center, Lebanon (2016); Tate Modern, London, UK (2015); Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany (2015); Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, Schiedam, The Netherlands (2015); Portikus, Frankfurt, Germany (2015), Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, Belgium (2015); Kadist Art Foundation, Paris, France (2015).

Nkanga was given the Special Mention Award at the 58th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, Italy, 2019 and won the 2017 Belgium Art Prize. Other notable awards include the Peter-Weiss-Preis, Sharjah Biennial Prize, the Lise Wilhelmsen Art Award, the Flemish Cultural Award for Visual Arts - Ultima and the Yanghyun Prize.

Recent, current and forthcoming projects

'Otobong Nkanga: Cadence', Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, USA (10 October 2024 - 8 June 2025)

'Arte Povera', Bourse de Commerce - Pinault Collection, Paris, France (9 October 2024 - 20 January 2025)

'Otobong Nkanga: Craving for Southern Light',  IVAM, València, Spain (13 July 2023 – 7 Jan 2024)

'Dear Earth: Art and Hope in a Time of Crisis', Hayward Gallery, London, UK (21 June –⁠ 3 Sep 2023)

Silent Force, Red Caress
Alignment
Unearthed – Sunlight
Unearthed – Sunlight
Unearthed – Abyss
Lined with shivers sprouting from the rock
25 drawings from 1997-2015
Taste of a Stone
Veins Aligned
Extraction
Taste of a Stone
Aging Ruins Dreaming Only to Recall the Hard Chisel from the Past
Constellation to Appease
Double Plot
Carved to Flow: Laboratory
Taste of a Stone – Ikọ
Steel to Rust – Meltdown
Solid Maneuvers
Solid Maneuvers
The Weight of Scars
Wetin You Go Do?
Diaspore
In Pursuit of Bling
In Pursuit of Bling – The Transformation
Glimmer: Fragments
Taste of a Stone: Itiat Esa Ufok

Otobong Nkanga
Silent Force, Red Caress

2022
Hand tufted carpet, hand-dyed wool, glass, wood, handmade cords, various elements


Installation view Sint-Janshospitaal, Bruges, 2022
Photo Dominique Provost

Museum Exhibitions

Exhibitions

  1. Patternmaker's Maze - past exhibition

    Patternmaker's Maze

    20 July – 12 October 2024

  2. Otobong Nkanga: We Come from Fire and Return to Fire  - past exhibition

    Otobong Nkanga: We Come from Fire and Retu...

    24 May – 3 August 2024

  3. Matter as Actor - past exhibition

    Matter as Actor

    3 May – 24 June 2023

Shop

  1. Stitched Dreams

    Stitched Dreams

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