I think of the Earth as a being, like our body: water, air, tree, stone, plants are beings like our body.

(Otobong Nkanga, 2022)

The Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris is featuring the artist Otobong Nkanga’s first monographic exhibition in a Parisian museum in fall 2025.

Since the late 1990s, Otobong Nkanga (born in Kano, Nigeria in 1974 and now living in Antwerp, Belgium) has been addressing themes related to ecology and relationships between the body and the territory in her practice, creating powerful and visually impressive artworks.

Drawing upon her own personal history and her research bearing witness to an array of transhistorical influences, she creates networks and constellations between humans and landscapes, while broaching the reparative capacity of natural and relational systems.

Following her studies at the Obafemi Awolowo University of Ife-Ife in Nigeria, then the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-arts de Paris and the artist residency of Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, the artist has been interrogating the notion of exploitation, both of the soil and the body, as it relates to space, the earth, and its resources. She examines the social, political, historical, and economic relationships at work in our connection to territory, materials, and nature through the production of a tapestries, multidisciplinary practice (paintings, installations, performances, poetry, etc.).

The concept of strata is central to the artist’s work—both in the materiality of her sculptures, interventions, performances, and tapestries, but also her way of thinking about the relationships between bodies and lands—relationships of exchange and mutual transformation. Otobong Nkanga explores the circulation of materials and goods, people, and their intertwined histories, as well as their exploitation, marked by the residue of environnemental violences. While questioning memory, she offers a vision of a possible future.