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Fellowship

Fellow 2017/2018

Otobong Nkanga

Otobong Nkanga is a visual and performance artist whose practice explores the social and topographical changes of her environment. Through performance, drawing, photography, and installation, Nkanga examines how raw minerals are transported through covert economies and transformed into desirable consumables. Acting as a cultural anthropologist, Nkanga concentrates on specific elements of our surroundings in order to portray the ongoing challenges of (re)presenting environmental conditions. Within her imaginative and emotive installations and paintings, Nkanga opens up discussion on our connections with natural materials and resources, and their stimulating accounts. Her exhibitions have been at documenta 14, Kassel, 2017; Biennale de Lyon, Lyon, 2015; Bienal de São Paulo, São Paulo, 2014; and Berlin Biennale, Berlin, 2014. Solo exhibitions include: Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, 2018; Kunsthal Aarhus, Aarhus, 2017; and Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, 2016. She received the BelgianArtPrize in 2017 and Yanghyun Prize in 2015. Nkanga lives and works in Antwerp.

Otobong Nkanga

Otobong Nkanga is a visual and performance artist whose practice explores the social and topographical changes of her environment. Through performance, drawing, photography, and installation, Nkanga examines how raw minerals are transported through covert economies and transformed into desirable consumables. Acting as a cultural anthropologist, Nkanga concentrates on specific elements of our surroundings in order to portray the ongoing challenges of (re)presenting environmental conditions. Within her imaginative and emotive installations and paintings, Nkanga opens up discussion on our connections with natural materials and resources, and their stimulating accounts. Her exhibitions have been at documenta 14, Kassel, 2017; Biennale de Lyon, Lyon, 2015; Bienal de São Paulo, São Paulo, 2014; and Berlin Biennale, Berlin, 2014. Solo exhibitions include: Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, 2018; Kunsthal Aarhus, Aarhus, 2017; and Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, 2016. She received the BelgianArtPrize in 2017 and Yanghyun Prize in 2015. Nkanga lives and works in Antwerp.

Fellowship Research Trajectory

“To support” can be to hold up, carry, brace, reinforce, or underpin. It can be to provide for someone or something—to take care of and look after. In speech and thought, it can substantiate, attest, verify, and authenticate. A support can be a pillar or a beam.

Supports move in circles, concentrically expanding and coiling into and onto each other. One support supports another, one grafts into another, inspiring ontologies of curves and arches. Biological nutrients circulate. Technical nutrients circulate. They regenerate and restore, forming circular economies.

Carved to Flow is one such circle, arching from Athens to Kassel during documenta 14, 2017 to somewhere else. In Athens, it is a laboratory in which oils, butters, and lye from around the Mediterranean, Middle East, North and West Africa meet to create soap. In Kassel, it is storage and distribution, stacked in towering blocks of saponaceous lattices, danced around to generate that which will circle back to take new form. During her BAK Fellowship, Nkanga initiates a new phase of her project: the germination, conducting the research needed to set up a physical structure in Nigeria and/or Greece that involves art, circular economy, ecology, and the archiving of local knowledges and practices.

[Based on texts written by Maya Tounta]

Online at: carvedtoflow.com

Mention for May you live in interesting times

BAK Fellow Otobong Nkanga was honored with the Special Mention Award, for her work May you live in interesting times, 58th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, 2019.

To Dig A Hole That Collapses Again

A survey exhibition of Otobong Nkanga’s works is presented for the first time in the US. The exhibition titled To Dig A Hole That Collapses Again opens at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Chicago from 31 March–9 September 2018.

Seminar with Andrea Phillips

As part of a session convened by 2017/2018 BAK Fellow Otobong Nkanga, educator and political organizer in the arts Andrea Phillips gave a seminar on her current research focus: reorienting contemporary art’s ecology toward producing more emancipatory forms of sharing—not simply about spatial sharing and inclusivity, but also at the level of wage labor.   […]

Program

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