Malmö Konsthall hosts Otobong Nkanga's first major Scandinavian retrospective

MALMÖ.- Since the late 1990s, Otobong Nkanga has explored themes related to ecology and the relationships between the body and territory. Through her multidisciplinary practice, she has been delving deeply into issues such as mining extraction and the use of the earth’s resources, but also the body and its connection to space and the earth.

The notion of strata is central both in the materiality of Nkanga’s works and in her way of thinking about the relationships between human beings and the places they inhabit and transform—and in which they are also transformed themselves. She simultaneously observes the circulation of materials, goods and people, their intermingled histories and their exploitation, marked by the residue of environmental violence. While questioning memory, she offers a vision of a possible future.

Otobong Nkanga was born in 1974 in Kano (Nigeria) and is now based in Antwerp (Belgium). Drawing from her personal history and research grounded in different transhistorical influences, she creates networks and constellations between human beings and landscapes, highlighting the reparative capacity of natural and relational systems.

At once a survey and a cross section of the artist’s multifaceted body of work, the exhibition traces a genealogy of recurring subjects whose visual expression is constantly evolving. It brings together emblematic installations, monumental tapestries and a significant number of drawings, some of which go back to the earliest years of her career and are being shown for the first time. Here, the selected works are reactivated through a poetics of entanglement, creating connections between forms, materials and ideas.

I dreamt of you in colours is Otobong Nkanga’s first major retrospective in Scandinavia. The exhibition is organised in collaboration with the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris (MAM), Paris Musées and the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne (MCBA).

Curators

Paris and Lausanne: Odile Burluraux (MAM) and Nicole Schweizer (MCBA)
Malmö: Mats Stjernstedt (Malmö Konsthall)