2025 Nasher Prize Laureate Otobong Nkanga Awakens Memories, Emotions With Groundbreaking Multisensory Sculptural Installation

Forbes

11-04-2025

Crawling or kneeling to fully inhale the melange of amaranth, chicory, cacao, coffee, juniper, grapefruit, hawthorn, orange, sarsaparilla, sorghum, yucca, and sassafras, visitors to the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas are drawn into a multi-sensory exploration of materials that challenge human perception. Intoxicated by the redolence, close viewers carefully examine the textures and forms snaking through the gallery. Through the immersion which awakens memories and stirs emotions, we are individually and collectively navigating history, material culture, ecology, and community, in this case including patterns of migration across North Texas.
Nigeria-born, Belgium-based artist Otobong Nkanga (b. 1974), the 2025 Nasher Prize Laureate, takes viewers on an immersive journey through Otobong Nkanga: Each Seed a Body that compels us to reexamine our relationship with the land and the materials extracted from it. Such an intimate setting which ignites our senses and draws us to the ground as we relate both to the viewing site and the complex histories of the resources and how they are drawn into Nkanga's deeply contemplative oeuvre.
On view through August 17, the exhibition highlights Nkanga's flexibility and fungibility with materials, process, and use of space, combining new and re-envisioned work, including the continuation of her Carved to Flow project begun in 2017. Her new work opens a dialogue with Texas and how the community and environment has informed her practice.
'As we announced in 2023, we now celebrate each Nasher Prize Laureate over a biennial cycle, giving the museum and the artist more time to plan for work in the galleries and, more importantly, to publish a monograph documenting their impact on the field. It also means that we have more time to get to know the laureate, and in the case of Otobong, who frequently reimagines her work to respond to the place where it is presented. We've had the added privilege of having her here in Dallas over the past four weeks, as she has built her exhibition in the gallery, responding to the materials, histories, and people of North Texas. This open approach to making involving in-depth research reflection, as well as considerable time living in and engaging with the place and its people, provides the space for the kind of listening and learning that is essential to Otobong's work and to her as an individual, both her presence and her practice exude care, and that care, that deep empathic investigation, is central to the power of her art, which often stirs a profound sense of connection with its viewers,' said Nasher Sculpture Center Chief Curator Jed Morse.
Connecting her poetry with her visual art, language is as essential to Nkanga's presentation as are the materials she painstakingly curates, and Carved to Flow embraces the breadth of 'support' ranging from the potential to bear all or part of the weight of physical objects to offering psychological or moral support by offering love, encouragement, and emotional availability to others. The latter is exemplified by the thriving Dallas art community's embrace of Nkanka, who arrived in the city on March 11 to install the exhibition and has become an integral part of its cultural fabric.
'I've been here for almost four weeks, and every day has been a blessing. It's made it just a good place to work, and I have fond and beautiful memories,' Nkanga said at the glitzy Nasher Prize Gala featuring awe-inspiring dance performances last Saturday at the Sculpture Center.
After thanking the various people who made the prize and exhibition possible, including the overnight guards who 'stand there diligently taking care of the work," Nkanga expressed gratitude for 'all (who) have walked the path with me, my mother, my father, my brothers, my sister, my mentors, those that are not here today. I really appreciate you, because you've given me what nobody else can give, what money cannot buy. It's a gift. And for me, I thank you all, and for those of you that we're meeting now and we will meet in the future. Thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate it. And to the next laureate!'
Each guest at the gala was given a handmade, cold process, natural soap made of oils and butter from the Americas fused together with water, lye, vanilla honey, and poppy seed which must cure for a month before using. The gift further connects revelers to Carved to Flow which began in a laboratory in Athens where oils, butters, and lye from the Mediterranean, Middle East, and North and West Africa were intermingled to create a soap. As celebrants returned to their homes with the soap, they became part of the process, a circle back to somewhere else, to assume a new form as a no-waste product 'carved to flow."
This year's prize chairs, Matrice Ellis-Kirk and Lucilo Peña, spent time with Nkanga in Dallas, at her home and studio in Antwerp, and in New York.
'In Antwerp, she was preparing for her show at MoMA (the Museum of Modern Art in New York), which we were able to experience in person last year. Not only was it stunning, but we also saw how audiences responded to the dazzling 60-foot tapestry, surrounding sculptures, and incorporated sounds,' Peña said.
Ellis-Kirk added: 'Now, because of the support of many in the room tonight, we are able to share that awe at the Nasher, seen in the museum through her exhibition and bolstered by the meaningful programs the Nasher has held, and will hold, through the summer.'
'We all know why we are here tonight to celebrate through the recognition of one living artist sculpture, though this is simply put, the Nasher Prize was established to reveal the tremendous breadth and potential of sculpture as artists continue to evolve the art form and push our understanding of it and the hands of the eight Nasher Prize Laureates, we see that sculpture takes many forms, occupies all kinds of spaces, and can ignite within us a world of meaning,' said business leader, lawyer, and philanthropist, Nancy A. Asher. 'My parents, Ray and Patsy Nasher, would not only be thrilled, but captivated to witness it themselves. Tonight, we again honor a boundless exploration of sculpture. If you walk through the museum tonight, you will find a winding rope encased in a progression of raw materials such as juniper berries, yucca root, amaranth, orange peel, and aloe vera at the center, where it rises from the floor, a warm smell of coffee, chocolate, and chicory emanates. An experience and experience not typically found in an art museum, the collection of local materials and their resulting aroma trigger memory, signify place and represent movement.'
Otobong Nkanga and Nancy Nasher.
Photo by Exploredinary
Nkanga is the eighth artist to receive the Nasher Prize and the first to be feted on the biennial cycle. Previous winners are Senga Nengudi (2023), Nairy Baghramian (2022), Michael Rakowitz (2020-21), Isa Genzken (2019), Theaster Gates (2018), Pierre Huyghe (2017) and Doris Salcedo (2016). The 2025 Nasher Prize jury that selected Nkanga is comprised of Nairy Baghramian, artist; Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Director of Castello di Rivoli, Italy; Lynne Cooke, Senior Curator, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Briony Fer, Professor, History of Art, University College London; Hou Hanru, Artistic Director, MAXXI, Rome; Yuko Hasegawa, Director of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa Japan; Rashid Johnson, artist; Pablo León de la Barra, Curator at Large, Latin America, Guggenheim Museum; and Sir Nicholas Serota, Chair, Arts Council England.
Otobong Nkanga with the 2025 Nasher Prize.
Photo by Can Turkyilmaz