Otobong Nkanga
Otobong Nkanga
Her work engages with the difficult histories of land acquisition and ownership, as well as the processes and consequences of the extraction of natural resources. This ongoing exploration into the transformation of minerals into desirable commodities - including the use of mica in make-up to give glimmer and shine - is a commentary on the value placed on material culture, often at the expense of the environment.
Drawing - removing the head because it has too much information in it - the nose, the lips, too much there. She is interested in gesture, of doing, making and creating. Focussing on what we do and how - that connection with the body rooted like a tree, not a nationality but part of the land.
https://www.otobong-nkanga.com/
https://www.instagram.com/otobongnkanga/?hl=en
Imagining the Scars of the Landscape - imagining the glistening mica from the earth in Lagos as make up, during the time of Diana Ross, Boney M. Multiple ways of understanding how we can all be here together. Mental, emotional, physical scars of the landscape - a place that been blown up by dynamite. How technology of destruction and the destructification allows us to understand colonialisation. Taking a place and taking it over, ruining it, creating scars. https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-st-ives/otobong-nkanga
Repair, hope and resillience
Reconnecting with nature - extracting from nature and transforming. Collecting and consuming materials without knowing their providence, which disconnects. We have disconnected to other life forms. We impose our timelines on the timelines of other species - a tree, ancestors, a tortoise can live up to 300 years. How do we align with other timelines? Seeds in the desert lie dormant for a long time until the conditions are right withstanding extreme heat and resistance but yet a single raindrop triggers sudden growth and regeneration. How do we reconnect with other timelines?
https://press.moma.org/exhibition/otobong-nkanga-cadence/
Ken Saro Wiwa - Nigerian writer, imprisoned for work around crude oil extraction and environmental devastation and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Saro-Wiwa
Observations
I am interested in the value placed on material culture at the expense of ecological systems and also the idea of timelines. A response to this might include
Compost values - what is valuable in that small, closed, ecological system? Creating ink is value laden but I feel the point could be stronger…
Compost alchemy - what goes in is as valuable as what comes out
Who defines these values and how might we change those value laden views - manure has value to the farmer and to the land but it’s just poo to everyone else
‘Unattractive’ species, unappealing aspects of the ecological life cycle - Sarah Gillespie’s moths, funghi, mould - Nkanga’s glitter is pretty and fun, in a way commodifiable and performative. I anticipate beauty in a place of unvalued, unloved ruination - compost, decay, excrement, brown goo