A large tapestry in the form of a spectacular theatrical scenery confronts the viewer as soon as they enter the gallery. The work titled Double Plot (Double Plot, 2018) projects some of the obsessions that the African artist Otobong Nkanga (Kano, Nigeria, 1974) has been exploring over the last decades on a round trip between the African continent and the western world. Issues such as the relationship –or connection– man-earth, environmental legacy and colonialism, daily actions and codes of life, consumerism and exploitation of resources, flow through her work and actions in all these decades.
Under the title of Longing for southern light, the IVAM presents the first major exhibition of the artist in our country, which brings together a selection of her works created in recent years, drawings, textiles, poems, sculptures, performances and also an installation made specifically for the center with potters from Manises as well as an action with the Mediterranean as the protagonist. That same sea that as she remembered has become a great human cemetery.
As the director of the IVAM and curator of the exhibition Nuria Enguita pointed out in the presentation, "I was interested in showing some lines of Otobong's work that she has developed especially in the last decade, since I met her in 2013 for the Sao Paulo biennial and that in recent years has been defined in wonderful exhibitions”. Throughout the rooms that contain the artist's works, the confluence between an artistic work with a powerful and marked poetic accent and at the same time a mysterious attraction or power guides the visitor's gaze in front of a series of works that seem branch in turn into many other works.
“The work of Otobong Nkanga –says the presentation text– constitutes one of the most solid and complex expressions in the landscape of contemporary art, combining the development of a critical imagination and a powerful artistic form with historical specificity, political dissemination and social care.
Daughter of a teacher, from very early she will know an iron discipline. “Not only did she have to memorize but understand each topic. My mother could make me work until three in the morning so that she memorized things, ”the artist recalled about her childhood. After a first artistic apprenticeship in Nigeria, she will continue her training in Paris, Amsterdam, to finally settle in Antwerp, where she lives and works.
The artist's drawings, Social Consequences (Social Consequences, 2009-2014), Filtered Memories (Filtered Memories, 2009-2010) as if they were a child's notebook, refer us to her memories and landscapes of childhood and adolescence, domestic scenes together with her sister in front of her house supported by fragile pivots mixed with images, objects, that evoke violence and destruction.
Among the outstanding projects that can be seen is the installation Carved to Flow (Carved to flow, 2017) a work created for Documenta 14 that took place in Athens and Kassel. The artist created a workshop in Athens to make soap with substances from the two shores of the Mediterranean and the Near East. “One of the things that connects all these dots is oil. We could think of the oil that is under the sea or on the earth, in the trees and plants”. “Thinking about what connects us, not what divides us and meditating on how people escape from places that nourish the world with their resources,” says Otobong.
The soap produced is now displayed forming small towers, inspired by soaps from Aleppo or the Palestinian city of Nablus. Proceeds from the sale of the soap go to fund an Athens art space and Nigeria-based Carved to Flow Foundation dedicated to the circular economy.
In 2015 the artist visited the north of Namibia and the Tsumeb mining area. Founded by German colonizers at the end of the 19th century, the landscape projects the destruction and greed that has been depleting this mineral-rich area, leaving an enormous scar on its geography. With the title of Solid Maneuvers (Solid Maneuvers, 2015) the last installation opens as the final destination of the exhibition. In the manner of a cultural anthropologist, Otobong Nkanga explores the vestiges of a natural landscape transformed and manipulated by man. Perhaps the memory of those childhood walks along the beaches of Lagos in search of minerals soaked in the southern light.
Otobong Nkanga Longing for southern light Ivam, Valencia. www.ivam.es. Until January 7
