Otobong Nkanga: Craving for Southern Light

The Institut València d’Art Modern IVAM presents the first exhibition in Spain of the Nigerian artist Otobong Nkanga. The exhibition Craving for Southern Light curated by Nuria Enguita, brings together drawings, textiles, poems, sculptures, objects and performances in which he reflects on the earth as a place of life and as a source of resources, while questioning extractivism and production systems.

Using not only sculpture, drawing and performance but also writing and pedagogical formats, Otobong Nkanga (Kano, Nigeria, 1974) analyses the notion of earth as a geological and discursive formation. She often starts from the systems and procedures used locally to excavate raw materials, processing them technologically and distributing them on a global scale. From this point, she follows the threads that bind together the minerals, material culture and the construction of desire with the redistribution of power and knowledge.

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. By exploring the notion of earth as a place of non-belonging, Nkanga provides an alternative significance to social ideas of identity. She also shows the inherent complexities of natural resources and their potential values in order to provoke narratives or histories related to earth.

Stones, cloths and plants are other materials that Otobong Nkanga uses in her installations, permitting her to speak of the earth and the people who inhabit it. The works are always intended metaphorically as symbols of the global system, involving images of migration, transformation, appropriation and loss.

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