Otobong Nkanga

Studies
2005 – 2008 DasArts, Advanced Studies in the Performing Arts, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
2002 – 2003 Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
1995 – 2001 Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux – Arts (ENSBA) Paris, France.
1992 – 1994 Obafemi Awolowo University, (OAU) Ile – Ife, Osun State, Nigeria.

Otobong Nkanga was born in 1974, Kano, Nigeria?. She lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium. A visual artist and performer, Nkanga began her art studies at the Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ife, Nigeria and continued at the École Superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, France. She was at the residency program at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
In 2008, she obtained her Masters in the Performing Arts at Dasarts, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Otobong Nkanga's drawings, installations, photographs and sculptures variously examine ideas around land and the value connected to natural resources.
In the work of Otobong Nkanga, activities and performance permeate all kinds of media and motivate photography, drawing, painting, sculpture, installation and video, though all the different works are thematically connected through architecture and landscape. As a human trace that testifies of ways of living and environmental issues, architecture and landscape act as a sounding board for narration and the performative. According to the artist herself, she uses her body and voice in live performances or in videos to become the protagonist in her work. However, her presence serves mostly as a self-effacing catalyst, an invisible hand that sets the artistic process in motion. Nkanga negotiates the completion of the cycle of art between the aesthetic realm of display and a strategy of de-sublimation that repeatedly pushes the status of the artwork into contingency. In many of her works Nkanga reflects metonymically on the use and cultural value connected to natural resources, exploring how meaning and function are relative within cultures, and revealing different roles and histories for the same products, particularly within the context of the artists autobiography and memories. June 2013 to June 2014, Otobong Nkanga was a guest of the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm  Artists-in-Berlin Program.