Otobong Nkanga

Otobong Nkanga (born 1974) is a Nigerian-born visual artist, tapestry maker and performance artist, based in Antwerp, Belgium.

Quotes

• Humans are only a small, minute part of the ecosystem, but we as beings have forgotten this.
  • Tom Morton, Otobong Nkanga chooses life, Art Basel, August 25, 2023.
• Your ancestors are part of your life in the present, and they are also the ones who show you the way into the future.
  • Tom Morton, Otobong Nkanga chooses life, Art Basel, August 25, 2023.
• I don’t like the word “sustainable”, I never did. The whole system has to change.
  • Tom Morton, Otobong Nkanga chooses life, Art Basel, August 25, 2023.
• I wasn’t expecting this (winning the Nasher Prize for Sculpture), but I am extremely honored.
  • Zachary Small, Otobong Nkanga Wins the Nasher Prize for Sculpture, The New York Times, 5 October 2023.
• A young generation will be able to consider the planet we live in and find ways of repair, connection and love.”
  • Zachary Small, Otobong Nkanga Wins the Nasher Prize for Sculpture, The New York Times, 5 October 2023.
• I think that everybody has, I hope, or tries to in this lifetime, tries to have a passion of something that you wake up in the morning and and you feel motivated by. You feel that it's necessary for it to be in this world and when we don't find that quest, and when we do not know, it leads to many Questions of existence.
  • Victoria L. Valentine, Nasher Sculpture Center Announced Artist Otobong Nkanga is Next Recipient of $100,000 Nasher Prize, Culture Type, 7 October 2023.
• I'm very interested in the microscopic and the general, and how those two things intersect and play roles and expand our understanding of what we are.
  • Michael Irwin, Otobong Nkanga Wins Nasher Prize for Sculpture, Ocula, 9 October 2023.
• I am interested in this idea of what your perception is and what the reality of material is and what it can become. You realize how materials can relate to what our memory has registered. What happens if we play with that memory — try to break that perception and rediscover the material? If you touch it or smell it, it breaks our preconceived ideas of what it is.
  • Michael Granberry, Otobong Nkanga wins the Nasher Prize for sculptures that resonate across continents, The Dallas Morning News, 5 October 2023.

Quotes about Otobong Nkanga

• The work of Otobong Nkanga makes manifest the myriad connections — historical, sociological, economic, cultural and spiritual — that we have to the materials that comprise our lives.
  • Jeremy Strick as quoted in Otobong Nkanga Wins the Nasher Prize for Sculpture, The New York Times, 5 October 2023.
• Otobong Nkanga maps urgent global problems but does so in subtle, enigmatic, and probing ways. She works with materials that draw on many different aspects of the world's resources, and the complex histories of those materials are embedded in her works. The intense and productive way in which she presents formal and material questions is what marks out her huge contribution to sculpture right now.
  • Briony Fer as quoted in Nasher Sculpture Center Announced Artist Otobong Nkanga is Next Recipient of $100,000 Nasher Prize, Culture Type, 7 October 2023.
• Nkanga's work makes clear the essential place of sculpture in contemporary life.
  • Jeremy Strick as quoted in Otobong Nkanga Wins Nasher Prize for Sculpture, Ocula, 9 October 2023.
• Nkanga’s work harnesses sculpture’s capacity to embody experience; uses the Earth’s raw materials to incite feelings such as belonging, nostalgia, retrospection—through objects, through performance, through textiles, drawing, painting, poetry. She affects her audience, while suddenly addressing issues of consumption, globalism, connectivity, and more.
  • Jeremy Strick as quoted in Otobong Nkanga wins the 2025 Nasher Prize, Artsy, 5 October 2023.
• The prize (Nasher Prize) is awarded to an artist for body of work, for a trajectory, for some sense of promise, for an ability to move the language of sculpture forward, as I think Otobong does, in a very exciting way.
  • Sir Nicholas Serota as quoted in Otobong Nkanga wins the 2025 Nasher Prize, Artsy, 5 October 2023.
• Nkanga is broadening the concept of sculpture to be a sculpture about the anthropology of materials. Her work has so many trajectories embedded in it, from Arte Povera to tropical architecture.
  • Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev as quoted in Nigerian Belgian artist Otobong Nkanga wins $100,000 Nasher Prize for sculpture, The Art Newspaper, 5 October 2023.
• I see her (Nkanga) as an artist who works in sculpture, but who works across a variety of mediums and art forms. She produces installations, films, tapestries, drawings, poetry, photography and these are often brought together.
  • Jeremy Strick as quoted in Otobong Nkanga wins the Nasher Prize for sculptures that resonate across continents, The Dallas Morning News, 5 October 2023.