NKANGA – IN SITU

Galleries — Thu, 27 Jan 2022 14:49:09 +0000

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.

STOP – IN SITU

Galleries — Tue, 10 Dec 2019 12:42:19 +0000

Stop, let’s stop in this new venue, in this unusual environment. Let’s take the time to explore each floor of the space, from the basement to the terrace, to discover, through an itinerary of works by the gallery’s artists, this new destination of Grand Paris. The periphery questions, it opens new territories. Our urban habits dialogue with an industrial and rural history. Time may seem suspended, far from the frenzy of central Paris.
Stop is also a reflection on the need to give oneself time: reflection, the relationship with others, to the other, to what is different, to reflect on the state of the social world and that of our planet, to equally reread our history?

Komunuma (community or common in Esperanto) brings together, on the same site, several independent public or private entities, connected by contemporary art. The diversity of activities will generate collaborations and discussions, by providing a broad opening onto the world of French and international contemporary plastic creation. We would like the multiplicity of the proposals, on this enormous site, to encourage our public to spend time in it.
To inaugurate this new space, In Situ has decided to show most of the gallery’s artists in order to share with them the discovery of this venue that they will invest in the near future.
In the basement, Gary Hill presents the sound installation ?Up Against Down,? 2008.
The artist’s fragmented body is pressed up against an infinite surface, in extreme tension, whose feeling is heightened by a sound environment comprised of low-frequency waves linked to the pressure of the body. The physicality of the sense takes on a performative dimension here to which the artist is very attached.

Constance Nouvel created for the entrance of the ground floor space a wall work in a corner that questions the new venue’s architecture. Photography, as a starting point, is compared here with its environment, between real space and suggested space.
Drawing is asked here to move out of the flatness of the image in a mise en abyme of the space and its representation.
The architectural particularity of the glazed stairwell captivated the artist Vivien Roubaud, who deployed three fireworks explosions in it using a cascading hanging.
The artist reveals the object’s possibilities, seeking to extract its hidden qualities and their development in the space, and in a moment that is usually impossible for us to grasp.
The first and second levels of the gallery propose group hangings, creating bridges between the works the explore the intersections between art and science, the economy and society, history and memory, great art and popular culture, the idea of territory through environmental disturbances and their consequences?

You will discover Patrick Corillon’s flyer in the Komunuma tote bag.
Between reality and fiction, the Belgian artists ponders what the cultural history of Romainville could be. He will create the performance « A sentimental history of the ventriloquist » on Sunday October 20 starting at 4 p.m. as an avant-première.

Galleries in Paris » otobong nkanga

NKANGA – IN SITU

STOP – IN SITU