Otobong Nkanga

Last updated

Otobong Nkanga
Otobong Nkanga, Nottingham Contemporary 1907.JPG
Taste of a Stone. Ikǫ
Born1974 (age 49–50)
Kano, Nigeria
NationalityNigerian/Belgian
AwardsYanghyun Prize

Otobong Nkanga (born 1974) is a Nigerian-born visual artist, tapestry maker and performance artist, based in Antwerp, Belgium. In 2015, she won the Yanghyun Prize. [1] [2]

Contents

In her work she explores the social and topographical changes of her environment, observes their inherent complexities and understands how resources such as soil and earth, and their potential values, are subject to regional and cultural analysis. Her work has been featured in many institutions including the Tate Modern the KW Institute (Berlin), the Stedelijk Museum and the biennale of Sharjah. [3] She also took part in the 20th Biennale of Sydney. [4]

Early life and education

Otobong Nkanga was born in Kano, Nigeria, in 1974 and spent the majority of her childhood in Lagos. Her interest in art and the environment developed during her childhood when she would collect minerals and draw images with mica on the pavements of Lagos. [5] Her mother was a polytechnic teacher. Her father died when she was seven. Her mother then had to provide for Nkanga and her three siblings. [6] During her teenage years her family relocated to Paris, France, due to her mother's work. [7] Nkanga studied art at Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ife and continued her studies at Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. [7] Her mother died in a car accident just when she started her university studies. [6] She then went on to get a master's degree in Performing Arts at Dasarts, Amsterdam, in the Netherlands in 2008. [8] She currently lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium. [9]

Work and career

Themes and materials

Throughout her work, Nkanga explore themes of neocolonialism, ecological violence, and environmental protection. For example, in The Weight of Scars she depicts the scars of mineral extraction. [10] Also Nkanga's first US survey exhibition, To Dig a Hole That Collapses Again, sends a cautionary message about the world having an insatiable hunger for material resources and doing anything to obtain them. [11] In Pursuit of Bling relays the same message by drawing attention to extractivism and the world's desire to obtain rare minerals and metals. [12] In these ways, there is a site specificity to her work, as she states: "My work is interconnected with the places I've lived. What happens in one affects another. This is true for nature too." [13]

Nkanga uses many forms of media such as drawings, photographs, painting, textiles, videos, and sculptures, however she is mostly known for her installations. [8] As the writer and art critic Devon Van Houten Maldonado observes: "One foundation of her work involves breaking down and separating resources from the earth into piles, sculptures, and symbols – her focus is largely on the gross material." [14] Some signature elements found in her art include "material emotionality," which is the idea that objects can feel, think, and remember; she uses this idea to communicate the experiences of natural materials in her installations. [7] Body fragmentation – such as disembodied arms and legs – is another element that shows up in her works and it implies a lack of sense of a true whole. [11] Using objects from ethnographic collections such as the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt am Main, Nkanga explores, according to the artist, curator and writer Yvette Mutumba, "the relationship between the present context of the artefacts in the museum's Africa collection and their original cultural setting." [15]

Career

Her first personal exhibition, Classicism & Beyond, took place in 2002 in the non-profit organization, Project Row Houses in Houston. In 2007 to 2008, in response to the work Baggage (1972 – 2007/2008) by American artist Allan Kaprow, [16] Nkanga has designed a performance for the Kunsthalle Bern. [17] The initial work that was based on issues of movement of goods from one point of the planet to another, Nkanga introduces a post-colonial dimension. As evidenced the artist in an interview, [18] the concepts of identity, cultural specificities are again at the centre of her artistic gesture of re-appropriation.

Also, in 2008, the project Contained measures of Land used soil both as a symbol of the territory and competition and conflict. A year later, during her residence at Pointe-Noire, in the Congo, she has collected eight different colours of Earth. Pointe-Noire was colonized by the Portuguese and the French. Art critic Philippe Pirotte wrote that Nkanga comes to create a kind of vehicle for the presentation and the transportation which does not define the use value in an era where everyone is obsessed with the transformation of natural tools resources which serve humanity. [19]

Her project, Contained Measures of Tangible Memories that started in 2010, from her first trip to the Morocco, she explores the practices of dyeing. She essentially transform objects in circulation to objets d'art. [17]

In 2012, she has created a device for a performance, or rather an installation entitled Contained Measures of Kolanut with two photos, one of a tree called adekola and one with two girls imitating trees. Nkanga explained that the Kola tree is important for its culture and is a symbol of spirituality to its culture. After she suggested eating a brown nut ( Cola acuminata ) or a cream ( Cola nitida ). These elements existed for preparing a conversation. This type of performance can last for hours and requires a lot of concentration. [17]

The same year, she proposed a performance for the Tate programme "Politics of Representation" in which she invited visitors to explore the concepts of identity, perception, and memory. [20]

Other activities

Nkanga was part of the jury which selected Gaëlle Choisne as winner of the Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2024. [21]

Exhibitions

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tate St Ives</span> Modern art gallery in St Ives, Cornwall, England

Tate St Ives is an art gallery in St Ives, Cornwall, England, exhibiting work by modern British artists with links to the St Ives area. The Tate also took over management of another museum in the town, the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden, in 1980.

Sarah Lucas is an English artist. She is part of the generation of Young British Artists who emerged in 1988. Her works frequently employ visual puns and bawdy humour by incorporating photography, sculpture, collage and found objects.

Dawn Okoro, is a Nigerian American artist who paints figurative art works, as well as practices photography and videography, all inspired by fashion and popular culture. She graduated from University of Texas-Austin in 2002 with a B.A. in Psychology and Fashion Design and graduated with a law degree from the Thurgood Marshall School of Law at Texas Southern University in 2009.

Lynne Cooke is an Australian-born art scholar. Since August 2014 she has been the Senior Curator, Special Projects in Modern Art, at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chinwe Chukwuogo-Roy</span> Nigerian artist

Chinwe Ifeoma Chukwuogo-Roy MBE was a visual artist who was born in Awka (Oka), Anambra state, Nigeria, but spent much of her young life in Ikom on the Cameroon border, before moving back to the family home at Umubele in Awka. She lived in Britain from 1975. Her paintings, prints and sculptures are predominantly figurative, in the genres of portraiture, still-life, landscape and narrative subjects. She won international attention in 2002 for being the first of only two Nigerian artists to have been allowed to paint official portraits of Queen Elizabeth II.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hou Hanru</span>

Hou Hanru is a Chinese-born art curator and art critic. He is based in San Francisco, Paris and Rome. He was artistic director of the National Museum MAXXI in Rome, Italy, from 2013 to 2023.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev</span> Art historian, critic and curator (born 1957)

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev is an Italian-American writer, art historian, and exhibition maker who served as the Director of Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea in Turin in 2009 and from 2016 to 2023. She was also the founding Director of Fondazione Francesco Federico Cerruti from 2017 to 2023. She was Edith Kreeger Wolf Distinguished Visiting Professor in Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University (2013–2019). She is the recipient of the 2019 Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence. She is currently Honorary Guest Professor at FHNW University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern, Switzerland. She has lectured widely at art and educational institutions and Universities for the Arts, including the Goethe University, Frankfurt; Harvard University, Cambridge; MIT, Boston; Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Dehli; Cooper Union, New York; The Courtauld Institute of Art, London; Monash University, Melbourne; Di Tella University, Buenos Aires; Northwestern University, Chicago, and UNITO, Università di Torino, Turin.

Briony Fer, FBA is a British art historian, critic, and curator; professor of history of art at University College London. She has written extensively on diverse topics of 20th century and contemporary art. She has written essays on numerous contemporary artists, such as Gabriel Orozco, Vija Celmins, Jean-Luc Moulène, Roni Horn, Ed Ruscha, and Rachel Whiteread. A focus of her research is on the art of American sculptor Eva Hesse, as when she wrote for the catalogue for the artist's 2002 retrospective curated by Elisabeth Sussman at San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art in 2002.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Koyo Kouoh</span> Cameroonian art curator

Koyo Kouoh is Cameroonian-born curator who has been serving as Executive Director and Chief Curator of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town since 2019. In 2015, the New York Times called her "one of Africa’s pre-eminent art curators and managers", and from 2014 to 2022, she was annually named one of the 100 most influential people in the contemporary art world by ArtReview.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Njideka Akunyili Crosby</span> Visual artist

Njideka Akunyili Crosby is a Nigerian-born visual artist working in Los Angeles, California. Through her art, Akunyili Crosby "negotiates the cultural terrain between her adopted home in America and her native Nigeria, creating collage and photo transfer-based paintings that expose the challenges of occupying these two worlds". In 2017, Akunyili Crosby was awarded the prestigious Genius Grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Rivane Neuenschwander is a Brazilian artist. She is known for work that explores language, nature, geography, the passing of time and social interactions. At times her works are interactive, involving viewers in spontaneous and participatory actions. In her installations, films and photographs, Rivane Neuenschwander employs fragile unassuming materials to create aesthetic experiences, a process she describes as "ethereal materialism". While her work in the 1990s focused mainly on various forms of mapping and the use of "simple, ephemeral materials familiar to people living in Brazil" such as garlic peels, ants, dried flowers, soap bubbles, spice, dust, coconut soap, water, and slugs, her more recent works have dealt more directly with politics, sexuality, and subjectivity, particularly as an expression of the "pain and indignation that accompanies life in Brazil" under the government of Jair Bolsonaro.

Nairy Baghramian is an Iranian-born German visual artist, of Armenian ethnicity. Since 1984, she has lived and worked in Berlin. When the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum selected Baghramian as a finalist for the 2020 Hugo Boss Prize, they described Baghramian’s statues as: "...[Exploring] the workings of the body, gender, and public and private space."

Dineo Seshee Bopape is a South African multimedia artist. Using experimental video montages, sound, found objects, photographs and dense sculptural installations, her artwork "engages with powerful socio-political notions of memory, narration and representation." Among other venues, Bopape's work has been shown at the New Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, and the 12th Biennale de Lyon. Solo exhibitions of her work have been mounted at Mart House Gallery, Amsterdam; Kwazulu Natal Society of Arts, Durban; and Palais de Tokyo. Her work in the collection of the Tate.


Anne Barlow is a curator and director in the field of international contemporary art, and is currently Director of Tate St Ives, Art Fund Museum of the Year 2018. There she directs and oversees the artistic vision and programme, including temporary exhibitions, collection displays, artist residencies, new commissions, and a learning and research programme. At Tate St Ives, Barlow has curated solo exhibitions of work by artists including: Outi Pieski (2024); Hera Büyüktaşcıyan (2023); Burçak Bingöl (2022); Prabhakar Pachpute (2022); Thảo Nguyên Phan (2022); Petrit Halilaj (2021); Haegue Yang (2020); Otobong Nkanga (2019); Huguette Caland (2019); Amie Siegel (2018) and Rana Begum (2018). She was also co-curator of "Naum Gabo: Constructions for Real Life" (2020) and collaborating curator with Castello di Rivoli, Turin for Anna Boghiguian at Tate St Ives (2019).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Afi Ekong</span> Nigerian artist and arts promoter

Chief Constance Afiong "Afi" Ekong, Lady Attah was a Nigerian artist and arts promoter.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elvira Dyangani Ose</span> Spanish art curator (born 1974)

Elvira Dyangani Ose is a Spanish art curator who has been serving as the director of MACBA Contemporary Art Museum in Barcelona.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa</span> Art museum, design/textile museum, historic site in Cape Town, South Africa

Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa is a public non-profit museum in Cape Town, South Africa. Zeitz MOCAA opened on September 22, 2017 as the largest museum of contemporary art from Africa and its diaspora. The museum is located in the Silo District at the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront in Cape Town. A retail and hospitality property, the Waterfront receives around 24 million local and international visitors per year.

Michelle Kuo is an American curator, writer, and art historian. Since 2018, Kuo has been a curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art. She was previously editor-in-chief of Artforum magazine starting in 2010.

Oroma Elewa is a Nigerian visual and performance artist, writer and creative director.

Adéọlá Ọlágúnjú is a Nigerian visual artist working with photography, video, sound and installations.

References

  1. ↑ Woo-young, Lee (12 November 2015). "Nigerian artist Otobong Nkanga wins Yanghyun art prize". The Korea Herald . Archived from the original on 26 September 2022. Retrieved 28 August 2024.
  2. ↑ Okakwu, Evelyn (13 November 2015). "Nigerian artist emerges first African winner of Korean award". Premium Times . Archived from the original on 9 February 2016. Retrieved 28 August 2024.
  3. ↑ "Otobong Nkanga". Contemporary And (in French). Archived from the original on 26 March 2023. Retrieved 7 March 2015.
  4. ↑ "20th Biennale of Sydney, Carriageworks". The Guardian . 14 January 2016. Archived from the original on 11 March 2022. Retrieved 28 August 2024.
  5. ↑ Clarke, Chris (February 2018). "Otobong Nkanga: The Breath from Fertile Grounds". Art Monthly (413): 35. ProQuest   2043673657.
  6. 1 2 Gipson, Ferren (2022). Women's Work: From Feminine Arts to Feminist Art. London: Frances Lincoln. ISBN   978-0-7112-6465-6. OCLC   1329421960.
  7. 1 2 3 Pahl, Katrin (2021). "Improbable Intimacy: Otobong Nkanga's Grafts and Aggregates". Theory & Event. 24 (1): 240–267. doi:10.1353/tae.2021.0009. ISSN   1092-311X. S2CID   234243538.
  8. 1 2 "Otobong Nkanga". In Situ - fabienne leclerc. Archived from the original on 30 May 2024. Retrieved 15 November 2021.
  9. ↑ "Otobong Nkanga | Visual Artist". Otobong Nkanga. Archived from the original on 11 July 2024. Retrieved 12 May 2021.
  10. 1 2 Samudzi, Zoé (January–February 2021). "The Paradox of Plenty". Art in America . 109 (1): 18–20. Archived from the original on 29 August 2024. Retrieved 28 August 2024.
  11. 1 2 DeLand, Lauren (October 2018). "Otobong Nkanga". Art in America . 106 (9): 118–119. Archived from the original on 21 March 2023. Retrieved 28 August 2024.
  12. ↑ Davis, Heather (1 July 2019). "Blue, Bling: On Extractivism". Afterall . Archived from the original on 29 September 2022. Retrieved 16 November 2021.
  13. ↑ Bailey, Stephanie (1 June 2018). "Otobong Nkanga". Ocula.com. Archived from the original on 25 May 2023. Retrieved 16 November 2021.
  14. ↑ Van Houten Maldonado, Devon (20 July 2018). "Imagining a Reconciliatory Relationship with the Earth". Hyperallergic . Archived from the original on 25 September 2023. Retrieved 28 August 2024.
  15. ↑ Mutumba, Yvette (2 October 2014). "Otobong Nkanga: Nothing Is Like It Seems, Everything Is Evidence". Afterall . Archived from the original on 29 September 2022.
  16. ↑ Meyer-Hermann, Eva; Perchuk, Andrew; Rosenthal, Stephanie, eds. (2008). Allan Kaprow: Art as Life. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute. p. 225. ISBN   9780892368907. OCLC   157022738.
  17. 1 2 3 Szewczyk, Monika (2014). "Exchange and Some Change: The Imaginative Economies of Otobong Nkanga". Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry (37): 42. doi:10.1086/679375. ISSN   1465-4253. JSTOR   10.1086/679375.
  18. ↑ Elderton, Louisa (October 2014). "Interview with Otobong Nkanga". The White Review . Archived from the original on 28 November 2023. Retrieved 28 August 2024.
  19. ↑ Bobin, Virginie (2007). "Participation: A Legacy of Allan Kaprow, P. Pirotte". An Invention of Allan Kaprow for the Present Moment. Bern: Kunsthalle Bern. pp. 9–17. ISBN   978-3857801501. OCLC   646305186.
  20. ↑ "Across the Board". Tate . Archived from the original on 6 October 2022.
  21. ↑ Le jury de la 24ème édition du Prix Marcel Duchamp Association pour la Diffusion Internationale de l'Art Français (ADIAF), press release of 14 October 2024.
  22. ↑ Bosah, Chukwuemeka (2017). The Art of Nigerian Women. Okediji, Moyosore B. (Moyosore Benjamin). New Albany, Ohio: Ben Bosah Books. p. 50. ISBN   978-0-9969084-5-0. OCLC   965603634.
  23. ↑ "The Encounter That Took a Part of Me | Otobong Nkanga". Gallery Viewer. 2016. Archived from the original on 29 June 2022. Retrieved 3 September 2024.
  24. ↑ Foumberg, Jason (2 August 2018). "Otobong Nkanga's To Dig a Hole That Collapses Again". BOMB Magazine . Archived from the original on 29 August 2024. Retrieved 28 August 2024.
  25. ↑ Whitehead, Anna Martine (26 March 2018). "Otobong Nkanga: To Dig a Hole That Collapses Again". Frieze . Archived from the original on 23 February 2024. Retrieved 28 August 2024.
  26. ↑ "Otobong Nkanga". Tate . 2019. Archived from the original on 30 November 2023. Retrieved 28 August 2024.
  27. ↑ "Otobong Nkanga: There's No Such Thing as Solid Ground". Berliner Festspiele . 2020. Archived from the original on 2 June 2023.
  28. ↑ "Otobong Nkanga. Of Cords Curling around Mountains". Castello di Rivoli . 2021. Archived from the original on 5 October 2023. Retrieved 28 August 2024.
  29. ↑ "Underneath the Shade We Lay Grounded. Otobong Nkanga". Musea Brugge. 2022. Archived from the original on 29 August 2024. Retrieved 28 August 2024.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.