Exhibition with Otobong Nkanga

This autumn’s exhibition at Malmö Konsthall presents the multifaceted artistic practice of Otobong Nkanga. “I dreamt of you in colours” is the first large-scale presentation of her work in Sweden. It brings together drawings, paintings, installations, tapestries, photographs, video works, sculptures, ceramics, performance and sound works that, drawing on strategies of resistance, poetically illuminate the connections between racialised capitalism and the accelerating climate crisis.

Otobong Nkanga was born in 1974 in Kano, Nigeria, and is now based in Antwerp, Belgium. Since the late 1990s, she has explored ecological themes and the relationship between body and land in powerful works with a strong visual presence. After studying at Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ife, Nigeria, the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-arts in Paris, and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, she has focused on issues related to mining and the exploitation of the Earth’s resources, as well as the body in relation to space and the earth. Through a range of artistic techniques and forms of expression, she examines the complex social, political and material connections between these themes.

Drawing on personal experience and her own research, shaped by cross-historical and multicultural influences, Nkanga establishes networks and constellations between people and landscapes while examining the capacity of natural and relational systems to recover. The idea of the stratum—a layer or level in fields including geology and social science—is central to her practice both materially, in her sculptures, interventions, performance works and tapestries, and in the way she considers the connections between bodies and places. These connections involve mutual exchange and transformation.

Nkanga explores not only the idea of flows of materials and goods, and of people with their entangled narratives and histories, but also their exploitation, marked by the lingering remnants of a violent colonial history. By questioning memory, she offers a vision of a possible future.

“I dreamt of you in colours” presents a cross-section of Nkanga’s diverse artistic production, from her early works to the present, through recurring themes and continually evolving visual expressions. For this exhibition, she has reactivated some works by introducing new elements on site, in a kind of poetics of entanglement that establishes connections between forms, materials and ideas.

The exhibition is produced in collaboration with Musée d’Art moderne de Paris (MAM), Paris Musées and Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne (MCBA). Curators in Paris and Lausanne: Odile Burluraux (MAM) and Nicole Schweizer (MCBA). Curator in Malmö: Mats Stjernstedt (Malmö Konsthall).