HFBK

Through light and time, some artists manage to leave an indelible mark on human civilization, for they always occupy the space between the real and the metaphysical. Otobong Nkanga’s work constantly leaves us in this intermediate space between the unconscious and the conscious, magic and rationality, between one land and another, between one shore and another, between a spiritual world and a real world, between a supernatural world and a rational world, always facing the unknown of what philosophy calls metaphysics. The forms she evokes, the landscapes, her relationship to matter, to smells, to flavors, always plunge us, like Marcel Proust, into a distant past, sometimes familiar, but also lose us in a universe we are unable to explain or express, yet which we feel deeply because it cradles us in something eternal. It is this metaphysical dimension that stands out in Otobong Nkanga’s work.

She is an artist I have known personally for several years, and whose work’s evolution over time fascinates me. One of the defining aspects of her practice is also performance. With her unique talent, a sincerity that springs from the depths of her being is expressed through the vibrations she creates with her voice, through song. Her work is multifaceted, utterly immersive, and unforgettable. Every performance, every gesture, every back-and-forth between the individual and the collective, between her and her various avatars, gives Otobong Nkanga’s work a timeless, polysemic, and multifaceted dimension. She is a universe unto herself, whose openness invites everyone—regardless of gender, culture, social class, religion, or age—to lose themselves in order to enter into communion with the others who make them up.

On the occasion of this exhibition, Otobong Nkanga has organized a workshop, as well as a meeting with HFBK students, which, in my view as a professor of Time-based Media, offered an extraordinary example of the possibility available to any artist to move freely between one medium and another. Otobong Nkanga excels in this field, as she employs sculpture, installation, performance, song, textiles, architecture, and more…