Nasher Sculpture Center Announces an Exhibition by 2025 Nasher Prize Laureate Otobong Nkanga
6 January 2025
The Nasher Sculpture Center unveils details for its first Nasher Prize exhibition since shifting to the biennial program format, showcasing new and re-envisioned work from the 2025 Nasher Prize laureate, Otobong Nkanga. The exhibition will open on 5 April and continue through 17 August, 2025.
The work of Otobong Nkanga (b. 1974) reconsiders our relationship with the land and the materials extracted from it, engaging a dynamic and deeply considered range of materials within an equally diverse practice. Among the many notable and celebrated aspects of her work is her tendency to adapt artworks and projects each time they are exhibited or performed in a new location, allowing the concept to anchor itself to the local ecosystem, resources, and complex histories of that particular place. At the Nasher, Nkanga will continue this thread, presenting newly conceived iterations of major recurring projects, including Carved to Flow (2017-), along with a new work, each responding to the North Texas region.
Other seminal iterative works will be presented on occasion of Nkanga’s Nasher Prize exhibition, continuing the evolution of these site-responsive projects in a new region. Working in collaboration with local artisans to embed her works with traditions, materials, and techniques that are resonant to Dallas, Nkanga will explore new formal and conceptual presentations of ongoing series in the Nasher’s galleries. Nkanga will engage with Texan history, material culture, ecology, and community through a process of deep research and an exchange of knowledge. The artist will, in particular, navigate histories and patterns of migration across North Texas, considering the area as a nexus of movements connecting disparate lands and cultures. Additionally, Nkanga will debut new works relating to her practice as a poet.
“Otobong Nkanga demonstrates profound reverence to the material matter of the land and our relationship to it,” says Interim Director and Chief Curator Jed Morse. “Her penetrating works stem from enormous compassion and curiosity and we are honored to have her consider North Texas in her exhibition at the Nasher, just as we honor her for the tremendous impact she had made on sculpture.”
The exhibition is made possible, in part, by awards from the Texas Commission on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the City of Dallas Office of Arts and Culture.
Find out more via The Nasher Sculpture Center.
Image: Otobong Nkanga Carved to Flow: Germination, 2017. Installation view of Craving for Southern Light at the IVAM Centre Julio González, 2023. 1,000 O8 Black Stone soaps (cold process hand-made natural soap, butters and oils from across the Mediterranean Middle East, North and West Africa, fused together with water, lye, and charcoal) 2 2/5 x 2 2/5 x 1 3/5 inches (6 x 6 x 4 cm) each soap, stacked on 3 wooden platforms. 500 paper boxes printed with 8 different poems, metal structures, pointed wooden sticks, costumes for performers made in wood, metal and leather, belt, buckles, cotton clothes, cotton drapes printed with texts, formula of the O8 Black Stone soap and 8poems, laurel plants, earth, black stickers, natural sponge, metal containers, water. Hexagonal wooden structures with engraved poems, list of ingredients of the soaps and texts, containing 10 blocks of different types of soap of 3 7/8 x 23 5/8 inches (10 x 60 cm). Photo: IVAM Centre Julio González.
