Otobong Nkanga, 'Shaping Memory', 2012-14, Lambda print, edition for 5 + 2 A. P, 120 x 90 cm, Courtesy of In Situ/ Fabienne Leclerc.
Otobong Nkanga’s drawings, installations, photographs, sculptures and performances examine the social and topographical relationship with our everyday environment. By exploring the notion of land as a place of non-belonging, Nkanga provides an alternative meaning to the social ideas of identity. Paradoxically, she brings to light the memories and historical impacts provoked by humans and nature. She lays out the inherent complexities of resources like soil and earth and their potential values in order to provoke narratives and stories connected to land.
Employing sculpture, drawing and performance, but also writing, publishing and pedagogical formats, Nkanga looks at the notion of ‘land’ as a geological and discursive formation, often taking as her starting point the systems and procedures by which raw materials are locally dug up, technologically processed and globally circulated. From there she follows the threads that intertwine ores, material culture and the construction of desire with the redistribution of power and knowledge.
In 2013 during the FORUM programme of the first edition of 1-54, curator and artistic director of Serpentine Galleries, Hans Ulrich Obrist interviewed Otobong Nkanga on her career as an artist and her practice. In the talk Nkanga unpacking on her interest for performance art as a medium, states that “the performing art has always been there, but I never considered it performing art. Being born and living in Nigeria, performance art is everywhere, that’s where I learnt performance art.”