In a time of heightened hostility toward “the other” — countries, immigrants, scientists and academics — Otobong Nkanga is all about connections. Even as environmental protections are being discarded, the Nigerian-born artist emphasizes her work’s derivation from, and concern for, the Earth, its minerals and flora.
Winner of the 2025 Nasher Prize, awarded biennially by Dallas’ Nasher Sculpture Center for major contributions to sculpture, Nkanga has created new works now on display in one of the Nasher galleries. Typical of her output, the new creations incorporate organic materials from this area — but also from beyond, underlining interpenetrations of cultures and economies. Eager and outgoing in person, Nkanga was present for press and patron previews before the April 5 public opening.
Looped down from the ceiling and sprawling through a considerable expanse of the gallery, Each Seed a Body punctuates a long loop of thick rope with hand-blown glass globules of various shapes. Round, ovoid, pear-shaped or clustered, they’re given opaque finishes ranging from pure white to muted swirls of colors.
The rope is wrapped in shredded leaves, grains, flowers, berries, fruit peels and bark. Guatemalan and Nicaraguan coffees are incorporated, along with Jamaican and Mexican sarsaparilla, sassafras bark and yucca root. From one stretch to another, the rope changes color, texture and diameter as its composition shifts.
These plant materials also give the work an olfactory aspect. Getting up close and personal for sniffs of the hanging rope is easy enough, but you can also get down on hands and knees to explore subtle fragrances on the floor.
Each Seed a Body is a descendant of Wetin You Go Do?, a work for rope and heavy concrete balls, and a sound loop, first shown at the 2015 Lyon Biennale in . In contrast to the more formal, abstract character of the earlier work, the organic materials and varied glass punctuations of Each Seed a Body lend earthier and more playful aspects.
Each Seed a Body implies interconnections: of humans, of cultures, of economies, of cities. As Nkanga pointed out at the press preview, it can also be read as a metaphor for the human body’s networks of tubes, organs and receptacles. Viewers familiar with Richard Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung will be reminded of the operatic epic’s rope of history and destiny woven by the Norns.
Nkanga’s work has embraced a huge variety of media and expressions: drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, video, poetry and performance. But social and natural connections are central.
Natural elements and human connections of soap have inspired a series of creations titled Carved to Flow. For the first iteration, at the international 2017 documenta exhibition, Nkanga directed creation of black marble-like bars of soap incorporating ingredients from Africa, the Mediterranean and the Middle East.
The soap bars were sold, and a Carved to Flow Foundation was established to fund an organic farm in Nkanga’s native Nigeria and a nonprofit art space in Athens, where the soaps were originally processed.
For the Nasher’s Carved to Flow, a broad, boxy backing in gradations of russet evokes the area’s geological layers of iron-rich sandstone and soil. Short poetic expressions in script evoke their physical evolution.
On a shelf are lined up varied sizes of specially produced soap bars in two contrasting colors, along with clumps of some of their ingredients. Half are tinted by red clay, the other half whitened by sea salt, coconut oil and other substances. On a lower shelf are flattened paper boxes for packaging the soaps, which are expected to be added during the run of the installation.
Stone, with its resonances of foundations, structures, jewelry and, early on, weapons, is another recurrent element in Nkanga’s oeuvre. The Nasher installation includes Deep Surge, six chunks of multicolored sandstone quarried in Palo Pinto County west of Fort Worth. To Nkanga’s designs, local stone carvers have incised layered recesses suggesting topographical maps and strip mining. At their bottoms are glassy mixtures of sodium silicate and red clay from Buffalo Gap, near Abilene.
Connections — among cultures and people, and to the varieties of lands and their minerals and flora — come naturally to an artist born in 1974 in Nigeria, raised in Lagos and Paris, with graduate study in Amsterdam, now a resident of Antwerp, Belgium.
Exploring interconnected social, political and ecological issues, and movements of people and things, Nkanga’s work has been displayed in museums including the Modern in New York and the Tate Modern in London and acquired by many other important museums. She had an earlier Texas connection, as a 2002 resident artist in Houston’s Project Row Houses development.
“Humans are only a small, minute part of the ecosystem,” the artist has said. “My works connect us to our shared histories, not just through land and geography, but through emotions shaped by events and encounters. These are the cadences of life.”
Details
“Otobong Nkanga: Each Seed a Body” runs through Aug. 17 at the Nasher Sculpture Center, 2001 Flora St. 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday. $10; discounts for DART riders, seniors, educators and students with ID. Free for military and first responders with ID and SNAP EBT card holders. Free first Saturday of the month and 6 p.m. to midnight the third Friday of the month. 214-242-5100, nashersculpturecenter.org.
