Otobong Nkanga

Otobong Nkanga’s multidisciplinary practice examines the social, political, and material relationships with our everyday environment. Through sculpture, drawing and performance, but also writing, publishing and pedagogical formats, Nkanga creates pathways translating the natural world – its plants, herbs, minerals and living organisms – into networked, aggregated constellations evoking memory, labour, home, care, ownership, emotion, touch and smell.

By raising questions about the historical structure of a place, both physically and metaphysically, she lays out the inherent complexities of resources like soil and earth and their potential values in order to provoke narratives and stories connected to land.

During the first edition of RHIZOMA, Otobong Nkanga presented two new works: the permanent sculptural installation Where Two Gather and the experience-oriented installation  Strains and Residues. Along the walking route, Nkanga will also display the poem State of Being – a prelude to the artist book that we are preparing with her and which, for the first time, will include a wide selection of new and existing poems, combined with new graphic works.

Where Two Gather presents itself as a place where we can meet or where we can retreat for a moment. At the foot of a cluster of mature trees, marble, clay, metal and local plants are brought together in a sculpture that makes us think about what is going on – both visibly and certainly also invisibly – beneath our feet. The irregular line patterns in the stone and clay sharpen our awareness of what has happened at a particular place over a long period of time and whether or not it has left any traces. The local herbs and plants, selected to provide colour or fragrance throughout the seasons, add a physical temporal dimension.

Strains and Residues consisted of sculptural interpretations of the traces and processes that are usually present in MASEREEL’s workshop and that Otobong Nkanga herself experienced several times in recent months. For some time now, Nkanga has been preparing a number of graphic works that now serve as a new context for her poems and now offer the possibility of recreating a poem as an image.
The site-specific installation  Strains and Residues provides insight into this learning and making process. Nkanga activates and intensifies what is present and in its rightful place. The predilection for finished products is put off (for a moment). Instead, attention to and fascination with the present – but often invisible – raw materials, techniques, processes, labour and debris – in short, the materiality of what surrounds us daily and the possibility they hold of being transformed.

Where Two Gather (2025)
Sculptural installation, terracotta, marble, steel, regional plants
Approx. 6 x 3 x 1 m

Strains and Residues (2025)
Installation, various materials
Variable dimensions