Galleries in Paris

Visual artist and performer, Otobong Nkanga (b. 1974, Kano, Nigeria) first studied
art at Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ifé, Nigeria, and later at the Ecole
Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. She was resident at the Rijksasademie van
beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam, before obtaining a master’s degree in Performing
Arts at Dasarts, Amsterdam in 2008. Today she lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium.
Otobong Nkanga’s drawings, installations, photographs, performances and sculptures
question the notion of territory and the value given to natural resources in
different ways.
Her work presents the viewer with images that reveal a strong evocative power.
A wide variety of material and media give shape to works inspired by the Earth,
its over-exploited resources and the narratives that flow out from it. Her art
is located at the intersection of temporal and civilizational constructions and
thus expands beyond our horizons towards both different climates and different
economies.
Despite a refined aesthetic that may appear free of tension at first glance,
Otobong Nkanga’s works demonstrate a strong evocative power with depictions of
unstructured bodies whose disjointed limbs are linked together by ropes, roots or
branches. Far more than a visual collage, these links create a genuine network of
forms that repeatedly reverberate throughout a wide variety of media: drawings,
installations, paintings, textiles, photographs, sculptures, performances and
even poetry. Everything appears evolving and connected, in total interdependence,
like associative chains that the artist constructs little by little.
January 9 – February 12 2022
OPENING : January 9 2022, 2pm – 6pmFor her second exhibition at the Galerie In Situ, the artist presents several
recent works and also some older pieces that create a link, as always, with her
previous projects, such as the two sculptures “Post I” and “Post II” (2019). With
a height corresponding to the artist’s height, these sculptures form a sort of
metal carousel that employs twenty-four plates on which landscape images from all
over the world are printed—locations marked by trauma and littered with debris.
The wood panel painting «Borrowed Light – …» (2019) shows three arms connected
to each other by cables while being linked to a hollowed-out polygon, creating a
mechanical and stylized aesthetic highly representative of the artist’s graphic
work.
Several tapestries created for the exhibition reinterpret abstract fragments of
previous tapestry works in order to give them a new life. The artist sometimes
introduces plants and oxidized metals into these tapestries, resonating with the
color palettes of the threads that were used to weave the textiles. Initially, these
palettes were also present in several of Otobong Nkanga’s drawings, emphasizing
a relationship to raw materials that lies at the origin of her creations.
An installation made up by a hand-woven carpet, to which Murano glass objects
containing plant materials are connected by long ropes, invites the visitor to
lie down and restore his or her energy.
A selection of drawings will finally complete the exhibition.
In parallel to her solo presention, Otobong Nkanga also wished to invite four
African artists to participate in “Togethering,” thereby aiming to incite
exchange, emotions, organic relationships and connections.