Otobong Nkanga

From the Nasher Sculpture Center:

“The Nasher Sculpture Center unveils details for its first Nasher Prize exhibition since shifting to the biennial program format, showcasing new and re-envisioned work from the 2025 Nasher Prize laureate, Otobong Nkanga. The exhibition will open on April 5, 2025, in conjunction with a gala celebration to honor the artist, along with a $100,000 cash prize and an award designed by architect Renzo Piano. Nkanga’s exhibition will be on view through August 17, 2025.

The work of Otobong Nkanga (b. 1974) reconsiders our relationship with the land and the materials extracted from it, engaging a dynamic and deeply considered range of materials within an equally diverse practice. Among the many notable and celebrated aspects of her work is her tendency to adapt artworks and projects each time they are exhibited or performed in a new location, allowing the concept to anchor itself to the local ecosystem, resources, and complex histories of that particular place.

At the Nasher, Nkanga will continue this thread, presenting newly conceived iterations of major recurring projects, including Carved to Flow (2017–), along with a new work, each responding to the North Texas region. For Carved to Flow, created for Documenta 14 in 2017, Nkanga directed the creation of an ecosystem of exchange that resulted in bars of soap resembling blocks of marble, made from ingredients gathered from sites in Africa, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East. These soaps were processed in public workshop sessions in Athens, Greece—one of the sites of that year’s Documenta—then shipped to the main exhibition site in Kassel, Germany, to be displayed, discussed, and sold by performers. The project has continued with The Carved to Flow Foundation, established in Akwa Ibom, Nigeria, which funds two distinct initiatives: an organic farm outside of Akwa Ibom and Akwa Ibom Athens, a nonprofit exhibition space. This complex “flow” of production and commerce echoes the properties of the soap itself—its mutability through changes in temperature and other environmental shifts.

Other seminal iterative works will be presented on the occasion of Nkanga’s Nasher Prize exhibition, continuing the evolution of these site-responsive projects in a new region. Working in collaboration with local artisans to embed her works with traditions, materials, and techniques resonant to Dallas, Nkanga will explore new formal and conceptual presentations of ongoing series in the Nasher’s galleries. Nkanga will engage with Texan history, material culture, ecology, and community through a process of deep research and an exchange of knowledge. The artist will, in particular, navigate histories and patterns of migration across North Texas, considering the area as a nexus of movements connecting.”