Otobong Nkanga

From Kano to Antwerp

Otobong Nkanga was born in Kano, in northern Nigeria, in 1974, and spent most of her childhood in Lagos, where she collected minerals and drew with mica on the pavements, an early sign of where her art would go. She began studying art at Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ife, continued at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and was a resident at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. She settled in Antwerp, where she lives and works.

Land and what is taken from it

Nkanga's subject is the ground: soil, rock and the minerals in them — copper, mica, malachite — and the long chains of mining, trade and consumption that link a hole in one landscape to wealth in another. She works across forms: large woven tapestries mixing photography and drawing, installations with stones and raw materials, diagrams, and performances in which she handles and offers those materials.

For documenta 14 in 2017, in Carved to Flow, she set up a workshop that produced soap from oils and butters from Africa and the Mediterranean, and used the proceeds to support a foundation in Nigeria — an artwork that was also an economy. The foundation she established, Carved to Flow, includes an organic farm in Akwa Ibom, in Nigeria. Her tapestries picture the body and the landscape as inseparable, woven together with the materials taken from the ground.

How to look at a Nkanga tapestry: treat it as a map as well as a picture. The woven surface combines drawn and photographic elements, and the body and the landscape are treated as one image, so look for where one turns into the other. Then ask where the materials in the room came from, since her subject is the path from a quarry or mine to a market. In Pursuit of Bling: The Transformation (2014), a tapestry shown at Tate St Ives, is an example.

Museums

Nkanga has shown at Tate Modern more than once: she presented performance and installation works there in 2012 and 2015. From Where I Stand, at Tate St Ives in 2019–20, was her first UK museum exhibition and explored the politics of land, its acquisition and ownership, and its relationship to the body. The M HKA, the museum of contemporary art in Antwerp, showed her work in 2015, and in 2023 she had a solo exhibition at the Sint-Janshospitaal in Bruges.

Cadence at MoMA

From October 2024 the Museum of Modern Art in New York gave her its Marron Atrium for Cadence, a site-specific commission about the rhythms of ecological life cycles and social upheaval. The main element is a large tapestry on the atrium's highest wall, made with digital weaving at the TextielLab in Tilburg, in the Netherlands, from natural and synthetic fibres. Sculptures of dyed rope woven with hand-blown glass and ceramic hang from floor to ceiling beside ceramic tablets imprinted with her poems, and a sound work built on her voice and breath ties them together. MoMA's curator described the work as facing both the beauty and the degradation of the natural world after industrial revolutions, extraction and war. Two daylong performances took place in it on 23 and 27 April 2025. The museum's pages give different closing dates, in June and in July 2025.

Where to see the work

Cadence at MoMA has closed, as has the Tate St Ives exhibition, so the first step is to check what is on view now. Tate's pages on her appearances in 2012, 2015 and 2019–20 and the M HKA in Antwerp record her work. Ask each institution which pieces are on display, since displays change.

Recognition

She received a Special Mention at the 2019 Venice Biennale and has had solo exhibitions at major museums across Europe and North America.

See also

Yinka Shonibare; Nnenna Okore; contemporary African art; and our list of Nigerian artists.