Otobong Nkanga : I dreamt of you in colours

Since the late 1990s, Otobong Nkanga (born in Kano, Nigeria, in 1974, and based today in Antwerp, Belgium) has tackled themes of ecology and the relationship between the body and the land, creating powerful works of great visual presence. Following her studies at the Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ife, Nigeria, the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-arts in Paris, and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, the artist explored issues relating to mining and the use of the earth’s resources, as well as the body in its relationship to space and the earth. She examines their complex social, political and material interconnections in a practice that runs through multiple mediums and forms of expression, including drawings, paintings, installations, tapestries, photographs, videos, sculptures, ceramics, performances, sound pieces, and poems.

Drawing both on her personal history and her own research, which reflects transhistorical and multicultural influences, Nkanga creates networks and constellations between humans and landscapes while also looking at natural and relational systems’ restorative capacity. The idea of strata is central to the artist’s work – both in the materiality of her sculptures, interventions, performances, and tapestries, and in her way of thinking about the connections between bodies and lands, connections that involve mutual exchange and transformation. Nkanga explores not only the concept of the circulation of materials and goods, people and their entangled stories and histories, but also the idea of their exploitation, stamped by the remnants of violent colonial histories. Questioning memory, she offers the vision of a possible future.

Otobong Nkanga. I dreamt of you in colours features emblematic installations, photo series, recent works, and a significant number of drawings, some of which date from her early artmaking days and are being shown for the first time. The exhibition offers a cross-section of Nkanga’s protean body of work, from the start of her career right up to the present, tracing the genealogy of recurring subjects whose visual expression is constantly evolving. For her show, the artist reactivates certain works by introducing new elements added on site in a poetics of entanglement, creating connections between forms, materials, and ideas.

The featured works come from both public collections (Castello di Rivoli, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Torino; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; Stichting Museum Arnhem; Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne/Centre de création industrielle, Paris; Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Høvikodden; M HKA Museum van Hedendaagse; Kunst Antwerpen) and private foundations (Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel; Tia Collection, Santa Fe), as well as from private collections and the artist’s studio. (bron: website Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne)