Otobong Nkanga

This autumn’s exhibition at Malmö Konsthall is devoted to the multidisciplinary practice of Otobong Nkanga. Conceived in close collaboration with the artist, “I dreamt of you in colours” is the first large-scale presentation of her work in Sweden. It features drawings, paintings, installations, tapestries, photographs, videos, sculptures, ceramics, performances and sound pieces that poetically highlights the links between racialised capitalism and the accelerating climate crisis while at the same time leaning on strategies of resistance.

Otobong Nkanga was born in Kano, Nigeria, in 1974, and is based in Antwerp, Belgium. Since the late 1990s, she 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, Nkanga 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.

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.

“I dreamt of you in colours” 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 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 in Paris and Lausanne: Odile Burluraux (MAM) and Nicole Schweizer (MCBA). Curator in Malmö: Mats Stjernstedt (Malmö Konsthall).