2025 Nasher Prize Laureate 'Otobong Nkanga: Each Seed a Body' at Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas
6 January 2025
Until 17 August, The Nasher Sculpture Center presents 'Otobong Nkanga: Each Seed a Body', showcasing new and re-envisioned work from the 2025 Nasher Prize laureate, Otobong Nkanga.
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.
For Carved to Flow, created for Documenta 14 in 2017, Nkanga directed the creation of an ecosystem of exchange that resulted in bars of soap resembling blocks of marble from ingredients gathered from sites in Africa, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East. These soaps were processed in public workshop sessions in Athens, Greece—one of the sites of that year’s Documenta—then shipped to the main exhibition site in Kassel, Germany to be displayed, discussed, and sold by performers. The project has continued with The Carved to Flow Foundation, established in Akwa Ibom, Nigeria, which funds two distinct initiatives: an organic farm outside of Akwa Ibom, and Akwa Ibom Athens, a nonprofit exhibition space. This complex “flow” of production and commerce echoed the properties of the soap itself—its mutability through changes of temperature and other environmental shifts.
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.
Find out more via The Nasher Sculpture Center.
Image: Installation view of 2025 Nasher Prize Laureate Otobong Nkanga: Each Seed a Body, Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas, April 5, 2025 – August 17, 2025. © Otobong Nkanga. Photo by Kevin Todora, courtesy of Nasher Sculpture Center
