Otobong Nkanga Gets First Major Scandinavian Retrospective at Malmö Konsthall

Malmö Konsthall is presenting the first major Scandinavian retrospective of Otobong Nkanga, an artist whose work since the late 1990s has centered on ecology and the interplay between body and territory. Born in Kano in 1974, Nkanga works across disciplines to examine mining extraction and the consumption of the earth's resources, alongside the body's relationship to space and land. Strata functions as a key concept in both the physical substance of her works and her thinking about how people relate to the places they occupy, alter, and are altered by in turn. Her practice tracks the movement of materials, goods, and people, the entangled histories of that circulation, and its exploitation, which she links to the lingering effects of environmental violence. Memory is another recurring question in the work, through which she proposes an image of a possible future. The exhibition marks the artist's first significant survey in the Scandinavian region.