What Is the Sound of a Teardrop? You Can Hear It at MoMA – The New York Times

8 October 2024

Gazing up at the 60-foot wall in the central atrium of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Nigerian artist Otobong Nkanga felt both excited and terrified.

“You look up, and you’re like, ‘Oh my god, where is it going to end?’” she recalled thinking. “I’m always interested in working in spaces that aren’t that easy. This is by far the most crazy space.”

That was her first reaction when she visited the space with the museum’s chief curator-at-large, Michelle Kuo, after receiving a major commission from MoMA to build an installation in its Marron Atrium. The resulting work, “Cadence,” opens on Thursday and runs through June 8, 2025.

Her second reaction, she said, was to sing.

She improvised, starting high and operatic and ending with low tones, listening for reverb and echoes. “How does the voice bounce off the walls and run around the space before it settles on the ground?” she said she wanted to discover. “It’s just like wanting to know where the light falls.”

Nkanga’s voice is often a facet of her site-specific installations, which can seem simultaneously futuristic and primordial, apocalyptic and utopian. They are put together from tapestries, drawings, photographs and ceramics, which she assembles with found natural materials, and sometimes augments with performances and other sensory elements, like scents from herbs and oils.

“My work is connecting all these things and making it clear that it’s all intertwined,” Nkanga said.

Read more of Otobong Nkanga's profile in The New York Times here.