Tag: art world

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At Nigerian artist Otobong Nkanga’s latest exhibition at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, visitors are greeted with an unusual sign: “The exhibition in Gallery 2 includes the following materials. Visitors with allergies should take precautions.” Beneath it, a list reads like a well-stocked pantry or the ingredients of a flavorful concoction: “amaranth, chicory, cacao, coffee, juniper, grapefruit, hawthorn, orange, sarsaparilla, sorghum, yucca, sassafras.”

That didn’t stop viewers getting up close to the work. During the show’s opening days, visitors—including artist Rick Lowe and curator Koyo Kouoh—were spotted kneeling down, noses nearly touching the installation Each Seed a Body (2025), eager to breathe in its fragrance.

“It was important to have something that enters through the body, something you smell,” Nkanga told me in an interview. “I think of that scent as a sculptural volume that sits in your lungs, in your memory.”

Each Seed a Body—also the title of the exhibition—is certainly memorable. The long, snakelike, sculptural installation (more than 53 feet in length) is made from a hemp rope encrusted in herbs and foodstuffs that are either native to Texas or have become naturalized over time. The fluid form loops through the light-filled gallery, climbs to the ceiling and back down to the floor, and threads through blown-glass vessels like a very large beaded necklace. The combination of materials evokes stories of migration and generations of locals who have given to, and taken from, the land.

“The scent isn’t just an added layer; it’s integral to how the work operates,” said Jed Morse, interim director and chief curator of the Nasher Sculpture Center, during an exhibition walkthrough. “Smell is such a powerful connector to memory. Otobong’s installation really leverages that—making the viewer physically and emotionally attuned to the materials.”

Nkanga is the winner of the 2025 Nasher Prize, an award recognizing artists who have made profound achievements through sculpture. Her work is known to confront urgent environmental issues by grounding them in the specifics of place: the land itself, the people who move through it, and the histories it holds. Working with raw materials like stone, soil, and fibers, she transforms personal observations into installations that speak to global systems of extraction, migration, and climate change. Through this deeply attuned approach, she creates art that is both poetic and politically charged, intimate yet universally understood.

From a young age, Nkanga was sensitive to her surroundings: She knew to escape the heat beneath her family’s stilted house and spent time noticing the palm trees and fireflies. “I never really thought of myself as thinking about the environment,” she said, “but I was always observing and aware of things and how they were gradually changing.” That habit of close observation would eventually evolve into a practice that connects personal experiences to broader societal systems. “You’re looking at things and asking questions,” she said. “And you see that choices we made at certain points have shaped the kind of lifestyle and consequences we live in today.”

These shared histories and global concerns are at the heart of Nkanga’s work. At the Museum of Modern Art in New York, her current installation, Cadence (2024), uses tapestry, sound, and sculpture to explore grief and environmental disruption. And last summer at Lisson Gallery in London, she showed scorched ceramic towers, fiber works, and bowls of seeds, evoking a landscape of destruction and healing.

The Nasher show was made almost entirely on site and continues her place-based approach. “Otobong’s whole approach here is grounded in place—working with local artisans, exploring the soil, herbs, and materials of North Texas, and anchoring everything in sensory memory and shared experience,” Morse noted.

One such work is the latest iteration of Carved to Flow, a sprawling performance-meets-community-engagement project involving soap production that Nkanga began at Documenta in 2017. “The idea of Carved to Flow was really to make a work that can carve itself in different situations, to allow for something to flow,” Nkanga said. “So right from the beginning of the project, it was really a support system. At the end of the day, you end up having soap, but the soap is always a kind of material that allows for the narrative, the storytelling, the economy, to flow through.” Produced in Athens, the soap has been sold and over various iterations has funded the creation of a farm in Uyo, Nigeria, and an art space in Athens. Both serve as long-term sites for community education and regenerative farming.

The idea started with the process of producing black soap made with charcoal. “To make charcoal, you burn organic matter in the absence of oxygen,” Nkanga explained. “That led me to thinking about oxygenated space—what it means to be in a place where you can breathe.”

At the Nasher, Nkanga introduces two new soaps, one white, one red—08 Salt Rock and 08 Red Bond. Created in collaboration with local Texan soapmakers, the bars are made from red clay, vanilla honey, salt, pumice, and poppy seeds. Each with separate recipes, the soaps convey meaning through their contents: 08 Salt Rock evokes ocean currents and trade routes; while 08 Red Bond, with its use of local soil, connects to the earth and is meant to draw out toxins and trace buried histories.

Both of these projects reflect Nkanga’s care for materials and communities. She’s drawn to the personal, sensory relationships we have with substances like soap or amaranth—and to the large-scale systems those same materials move through. A plant grown locally might travel along global trade routes. A simple bar of soap might carry a powerful memory.

The esteemed curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, who was part of the Nasher Prize jury, noted that Nkanga’s work carries echoes of the Italian Arte Povera movement of the 20th century, where artists turned common materials into thought-provoking artworks. Nkanga studied under Arte Povera artist Giuseppe Penone for three years—a time that may have influenced her own focus on materials. Like the Arte Povera artists, she transforms common objects and elements into meaningful touchstones for connection.

Nkanga’s global travels have also made her particularly well-suited to create work inspired by the environment and climate change. “I think one of the places that really marked me not so long ago was Bangladesh,” she said. “Being there and seeing the 19th century in the architecture…you feel the past in a very intense way—and at the same time, you’re seeing futures in relation to monsoon floods and how that is being tackled.”

She sees this travel as a way to understand how humans have and continue to impact and damage the Earth, and in turn, how we are building and preparing for a future where natural disasters are a part of everyday life. “By moving through space, you’re actually understanding what are the possibilities in relation to the climate crisis,” she continued.

Whether by scent or sound, soap or rope, Nkanga’s work invites us to notice the systems we’re part of. “We have a shared experience in this world,” she said. “What happens here will affect elsewhere.” She added, “What I’m experiencing will fade, will go. But this experience has to be also talked about in a way that touches [something] more universal.”

That lingering scent that fills our lungs becomes something more than fragrance—it’s an invitation to pay attention.