A Nigerian Sculptor Reflects on All the Land Contains

New York Times

24-04-2025

When Otobong Nkanga appeared on the Art Newspaper's 'A Brush With…' podcast, the host, Ben Luke, asked which piece of art she would choose to live with, if she could choose only one.
It's a question he asks every guest. Most people pick historical masterpieces, a Turner, say, or a Giotto. Nkanga chose a stone.
Two years ago, Nkanga was announced as the 2025 winner of the Nasher Prize, honoring her work in sculpture.
It follows that Luke's immediate reply was: 'Because you could sculpt it?'
'No,' she said quickly. 'Because it would contain all what I need.'
The first time I spoke with Nkanga, in a video interview, it was three weeks before the opening of her Nasher Prize exhibition at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas (which runs through Aug. 17). The award comes with a $100,000 prize, one of the art world's biggest. When we spoke, though, she was home in Antwerp, Belgium, packing her bags to head across the Atlantic, and she still didn't know exactly what she would be showing.
Her plan had been to not ship anything ahead of time and instead make all new pieces, on site.
'I want to try out and see if I can make it happen,' she said. 'It's much more riskier in a way. I have such a short time to put everything together.'
The serenity and tangible warmth with which she spoke belied how high-stakes a moment this was.
Over the past 20 years, the Nigerian-born Nkanga, 50, has explored the idea of rock, and by extension the land that sheds it, as both a living entity and a container in a shape-shifting body of work.
Her exhibitions almost always take the shape of a site-specific installation or performance, often both at once. She has planted galleries with fields of pebbles, printed poetry and images on limestone and worn a crown of malachite through the streets of Berlin. In a 2013 performance titled 'Taste of a Stone: Itiat Esa Ufok,' she balanced on one leg atop a boulder in a courtyard in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, carrying a potted Queen of the Night plant on her head.
It is precisely the way she has exploded the notion of what sculpture can be that caught the Nasher Prize judges' attention. As Briony Fer, an art historian and member of the jury, stated in a news release at the time she won the award, 'Otobong Nkanga maps urgent global problems but does so in subtle, enigmatic and probing ways. The intense and productive way in which she presents formal and material questions is what marks out her huge contribution to sculpture right now.'
The second time I spoke with Nkanga, also via video, she was wearing bright red overalls that matched her crimson glasses, sitting on the white oak floor of the Nasher's Renzo Piano-designed building.
At her side, two assistants were helping her cake a long loop of thick rope with glue and dried aromatic plants, in sections: things like roasted coffee, sassafras bark and corn silk.
'We have to do the transitions to make sure that the colors are moving from one tone to another, slowly shifting,' Nkanga said. Once fully dried, the rope was to be hung from the ceiling by two particularly dark sections. The effect would be that of room-size incense sticks. The rest of the loop would flow across the floor, like a contour line on a topographic map.
Elsewhere in the room, Nkanga had been excavating what looked like miniature open-pit mining holes in boulders of red Palo Pinto County sandstone. And she had painted a temporary wall in seven thick bands of earthen claylike colors. A sense of the ground and groundedness was pervasive.
Nkanga sourced her materials from the Americas, many locally; she was thinking about the red earth of Texas and Mexico, of ingredients that spoke to the movement of people and food from beyond the Rio Grande and the trade wars between the United States and other countries.
Nkanga had also brought on board a Texan soap maker, Trang Nguyen, for a new iteration of her 'Carved to Flow' series. She first worked on this project for Documenta 14, in 2017, which took place between Athens and Kassel, Germany. She worked with Vis Olivae, a soap maker based in Kalamata, Greece, to produce the soap 'O8 Black Stone,' using ingredients from the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and North and West Africa. With proceeds from sales of that soap, she created the Carved to Flow Foundation in Akwa Ibom, Nigeria.
For the Nasher, she and Nguyen are producing two new soaps: a rust-color bar dotted with poppy seeds, called Red Bond, and Salt Rock, a pale chalky bar, made of lye, pumice powder and sea salt. As production continues throughout the show, the soap will progressively fill the space, 2,000 bars, wrapped in custom packaging printed with poems Nkanga has written.
Exhibiting at the Nasher comes with peculiar constraints, because Piano's building itself is an artwork to protect. You can't make holes in the oak floorboards or drill in the Travertine marble walls.
For Nkanga, though, just doing the show at all came with questions.
'Coming to America this time, it just feels a bit different,' she said.
She has been thinking a lot about what it means to work in the United States at this time, given the political shifts.
Nonetheless, she said she felt it was important to make work that could 'open up other possibilities and to create also spaces of rest, spaces for reflection and spaces to trigger other ways of existence and to open up other worlds.'
'It's good to be able to do this work,' she added. 'Especially with many exhibitions being canceled, money being taken out, language, different groups of people being targeted.'
Nkanga's work has often dissected how colonization affects people and places. When Nigeria, her home country, was colonized by the British, as she told the art historian Akin Oladimeji in 2024, 'We gave access to the core and the being of who we were. And the access to our lands, prodding, digging, taking out extracts, and the access to our bodies to check to see are we normal or not.'
Her insistence on acknowledging the connection between the living and the land provides a powerful counterpoint to so much of the art long made about land in America.
Robert Smithson, known for so-called earthworks like 'Spiral Jetty' (1970), wrote, in his 1968 essay, 'A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects,' of being conscious of geologic time and prehistory in order to 'read the rocks' he worked with — and decried how 'social structures confine art.'
Nkanga, by contrast, said that her work was a 'constant grounding back into reality': a reminder that amid all that earth and rock and wind and water, there are, and always have been, people and other living things.
Thinking about the ways in which governments and companies extract from the land without regard for whomever or whatever lives on it, Nkanga said, 'It's so important to constantly remind us that we do not exist without air, that we do not exist without water, that we do not exist without trees.'
She is the first to admit that, in winning the Nasher Prize, she's following a roster of extraordinary artists, name-checking the past winners Doris Salcedo, Theaster Gates, Senga Nengudi and Nairy Baghramian.
'When I heard, I was like, 'Really?'' she said, recalling the moment she learned she had won. 'I'm not thinking about the power of the work, I'm thinking about making it. But then at moments like this, you realize that it actually has a vibration that is touching different people.'
The heightened state of awareness under which Nkanga works often leads her, like piano wire under tension, to sing. When she's stuck in the studio, or waiting for a mechanical Jacquard loom to finish weaving a tapestry, she'll get up and dance. She loves, loves, loves to sleep.
Sometimes she cries, and, she said, 'I'm always grateful when it's a tear, because it means it's getting out.'
The parallel between these elements of her daily practice and her broader stance in prepping for this show is instructive: She's forging ahead with the exhibition, a means to expel doubt and instead give it wonderful shape. Three-quarters of an hour into our first conversation, I was struck by the power of this resolve.
'What keeps you going?' I asked.
She was quiet for 12 long seconds then, with a faint, heavy sigh, she said, 'because there's so much to do.'
'There is a certain trying to understand the world and your place in it and why certain things are the way they are,' she continued. 'But it's not only looking at what's not going right in the world — it's also looking at it in its sheer beauty.'