Visiting Artists Program (VAP) Resource Guides

Otobong Nkanga’s multidisciplinary practice examines the complex social, political, ecological, and material relationships between bodies, territories, minerals, and the earth. Unsettling the divisions between minimal and conceptual or sensual and surreal approaches, the artist’s research-based practice constellates humans and landscapes, organic and non-organic matter. Through drawing, installation, performance, photography, textiles, and sculpture, Nkanga creates pathways translating the natural world—its plants, herbs, minerals, and living organisms—into networked, aggregated situations evoking memory, labor, home, care, ownership, emotion, touch, and smell. Reframing people and objects as compressed multitudes and as entities that come into being in relation to other entities, Nkanga deftly weaves insights from geology, botany, poetry, and non-Western knowledge systems. Her works’ allusions to the reparative potentials of connectivity urgently gesture toward the possibility of more livable futures. 

Born in Kano, Nigeria, Nkanga lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium. Last fall (2024) she presented a new, site-specific commission at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. She has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Institut Valencià d'Art Modern, Valencia, Spain (2023); Frist Art Museum, Nashville (2023); Museum Sint-Janshospitaal, Bruges, Belgium (2022); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Bregenz, Austria (2021); Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, Turin, Italy (2021); Villa Arson, Nice, France (2021); Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Høvikodden, Norway (2020); Gropius Bau, Berlin, Germany (2020); Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, United Kingdom (2020); Tate St Ives, St Ives, United Kingdom (2019); Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town (2019); Ar/Ge kunst Galleria Museo, Bolzano, Italy (2018); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2018); Kunsthal Aarhus, Aarhus, Denmark (2017); Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, United Kingdom (2016); Beirut Art Center, Beirut, Libanon (2016); Tate Modern, London (2015); Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany (2015); Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, The Netherlands (2015); Portikus, Frankfurt, Germany (2015), Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp, Belgium (2015); and KADIST, Paris (2015). Her work has been prominently featured in international biennials, including the 58th Venice Biennale (2019); documenta 14 (2017); and the 13th Biennale de Lyon (2015). 

Nkanga is the 2025 Nasher Prize Laureate and was the recipient of the Golden Afro Artistic Award in the Visual Arts (2024) and the inaugural Lise Wilhelmsen Art Award Programme (2019); the Special Mention Award at the 58th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, Italy (2019); the Belgium Art Prize (2017); and the Yanghyun Prize (2015). Other notable awards include the Peter-Weiss-Preis, Sharjah Biennial Prize, and the Flemish Cultural Award for Visual Arts Ultima Prize. 

Otobong Nkanga. Photo: Wim van Dongen

Artist Website

Otobong Nkanga’s website

Gallery Representation

Lisson Gallery

What Is the Sound of a Teardrop? You Can Hear It at MoMA*
Nina Siegal | The New York Times | October 8, 2024
*This is a library resource that requires ARTIC login

Connections Beyond the Tangible: A Conversation with Otobong Nkanga*
Folasade Ologundudu | Sculpture, vol. 43 (1) | p. 12 | Jul/Aug 2024
*This is a library resource that requires ARTIC login

Spaces of Memory*
Ellen Mara De Wachter | Art Monthly (478) | p. 1-4 | Jul/Aug 2024
*This is a library resource that requires ARTIC login

The Elemental Pull of Otobong Nkanga
Vaishna Surjid | Frieze | June 17, 2024

Otobong Nkanga Wins the Nasher Prize for Sculpture*
Zachary Small | The New York Times | October 5, 2023
*This is a library resource that requires ARTIC login

Otobong Nkanga chooses life
Tom Morton | Art Basel | August 25, 2023

Michelangelo Pistoletto and Otobong Nkanga on the new responsibility of art
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev | Lampoon Magazine | October 24, 2022

The Paradox of Plenty
Zoé Samudzi | Art in America | February 16, 2021

Improbable Intimacy: Otobong Nkanga's Grafts and Aggregates*
Katrin Pahl | Theory & Event, vol. 24 (1) | p. 240 - 267 | January 2021
*This is a library resource that requires ARTIC login

Breathing Air into the Archive*
Lotte Bode & Timmy De Laet | A Journal of the Performing Arts, vol. 26 (7) | p. 163-170 | 2021
*This is a library resource that requires ARTIC login

Rough Version w/ Otobong Nkanga
Rough Version [Radio Show] | NTS | August 20, 2023 | Please note this podcast does not provide transcripts

Otobong Nkanga: Cadence
A new commission by the artist: an all-encompassing environment of tapestry, sculpture, sound, and text that explores the turbulent rhythms of nature and society. On view through June 8, 2025.

Otobong Nkanga: 2025 Laureate
Through a broad range of materials, used to orchestrate an equally broad range of artistic practices, the 2025 Nasher Prize Laureate, Otobong Nkanga, weaves together powerful works.

Otobong Nkanga. Craving for Southern Light
Nkanga’s monographic exhibition will include drawings, installations, photographs, sculptures and performances through which the artist examines our social and topographical relationship with our everyday environment. Previously on view July 13, 2023 – January 7, 2024.

Visiting Artists Program Lecture Recordings from the Archive
SAIC Visiting Artists Program video and audio lecture recordings (1977–present.) Available with SAIC login credentials.

SAIC Digital Collections: Visiting Artists Program
SAIC Visiting Artists Program publicity archive and audio recordings (1977–98).