Otobong Nkanga

Biography

As a child in Lagos she collected minerals and drew with mica on the pavements. An interest in what lies underfoot and what gets dug out from under it has remained her main subject.

Otobong Nkanga was born in 1974 in Kano, in northern Nigeria, and spent most of her childhood in Lagos; as a teenager she moved with her family to Paris. She studied art at Obafemi Awolowo University in Ife, and in 1995 entered the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where she worked in the studio of Giuseppe Penone. Then came Amsterdam: a residency at the Rijksakademie in 2002–03 and a master’s degree in performance at the DasArts school, completed in 2008; in 2013 she spent a year in Berlin on the DAAD programme. She lives and works in Antwerp.

Her first solo exhibition, “Classicism & Beyond”, she made in 2002 at Project Row Houses in Houston, and in 2005 she was part of “Africa Remix” at the Centre Pompidou. In 2007–08, at the Kunsthalle Bern, she re-enacted Allan Kaprow’s “Baggage” of 1972, a happening score about the transport of goods from one end of the planet to the other: she carried sand back and forth between the Netherlands and Nigeria, and so added to Kaprow the colonial history of forced movements of people and resources.

Since 2008 a series of works has been running under the general title “Contained Measures”. The first was a series of drawings on land as territory and cause of conflict, made in her Antwerp studio between August and October 2008; out of it grew sculptures such as “The Operation” of the same year. In 2009, on a residency in Pointe-Noire, in the Republic of Congo, a former Portuguese and French colony, she collected earth in eight different colours and exhibited it as “Contained Measures of Fragments of Pointe Noire”; the critic Philippe Pirotte wrote that she builds a vehicle for display and transport that assigns things no use value. In 2010, after a first trip to Morocco, she took up dyeing practices (“Contained Measures of Tangible Memories”). In 2012 came “Contained Measures of Kolanut”: a table with maps of origin, botanical drawings and photographs, among them a picture of an adekola tree and one of two girls imitating trees. The artist sits opposite one person, explains that the kola tree is for her culture a sign of spirituality, communication and trade, offers to share a nut, brown or cream, something that in West Africa was by tradition done only by men, and then asks them to choose a card that sets the subject of her story. Such a conversation can last for hours; in 2014 it was repeated at the Logan Center in Chicago. In the same year, 2012, she made a performance at Tate Modern on the states of things and on such immaterial things as identity, memory and perception.

Her main theme is what is done to the earth: neocolonialism, the extraction of ore and minerals, the scars that remain. “The Weight of Scars” shows the traces of mining, “In Pursuit of Bling” the hunger for rare metals. She says that her work is bound up with the places she has lived, and that what happens in one place echoes in another. The bodies in her hangings and installations are often taken apart into arms and legs, and materials are credited with feelings and memory; with objects from ethnographic collections, for instance the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt, she works as with things torn out of their setting. To my mind it is precisely the hangings, a slow and domestic technique, that carry this heavy theme best in her work.

After that the exhibitions came one after another: the Berlin Biennale of 2014, the Lyon Biennale of 2015, “The Encounter That Took a Part of Me” in Nottingham (2016), documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel (2017), the first American survey, “To Dig a Hole That Collapses Again”, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2018), the Venice Biennale of 2019 with a special mention from the jury and “From Where I Stand” at Tate St Ives, “There’s No Such Thing as Solid Ground” at the Gropius Bau in Berlin (2020), “Of Cords Curling around Mountains” at the Castello di Rivoli and the Kunsthaus Bregenz, for whose concrete walls she wove huge hangings blazing with colour (2021), the Sint-Janshospitaal in Bruges (2022), the Frist Art Museum in Nashville (2023), “Cadence” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2024), the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris (2025–26) and Kanal – Centre Pompidou in Brussels (2026–27).

Prizes: the Yanghyun Prize in Seoul (2015), the BelgianArtPrize (2017), the Ultima prize of the Flemish Community (2018), the Lise Wilhelmsen Art Award and the Peter Weiss Prize in Bochum (2019), the Nasher Prize for contemporary sculpture in Dallas (2025). In 2024 she sat on the jury of the Marcel Duchamp Prize, and in 2026 she was made a Commander of the Belgian Order of the Crown. Her works are held by Tate Modern, the Centre Pompidou, the Museum Folkwang, the Denver Art Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp.