Otobong Nkanga at MoMA

Cadence, the Nigerian Belgian artist Otobong Nkanga’s (1947) monumental solo installation at the MoMA, which the museum commissioned from the artist specifically to occupy the vast Marron Atrium, is an overwhelming experience. The installation is evidence of renewed interest in the United States ¹ in the work of an artist who over the past decade has become a star in Europe and elsewhere (she displayed works at both Documenta 14 and the 2022 Venice Biennale and is scheduled to be the subject of a major exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne this fall). Nkanga’s often site-specific installations employ a diverse range of materials: intricate tapestries, dynamic sculptures, photographs, drawings, paintings, videos, sounds, an uprooted tree, a river of spices running through a gallery wall. These elements come together in dynamic constellations that explore the relationship between human beings and the land we inhabit — the ways in which we alternately shape and are shaped by it. Her work suggests that the global supply chains that circulate the raw materials we encounter in everyday life not only constitute complex social, political and economic networks, but trace networks of emotion and memory as well. Several of her projects additionally incorporate a performative or interactive element, perhaps most notably Carved to Flow (2017–ongoing), her contribution to Documenta 14. ² The first two phases of the work consisted of various different elements: an interactive soap-making laboratory; a public programme of talks and events; and an exhibition in which new soaps — made with butters and oils sourced from across the Mediterranean, Middle East, and North and West Africa — were presented to passers-by in bars by performers, who would talk about the work and ‘mediat[e] its sale under specific conditions,’ for example by allowing performers to refuse sale if they felt they were being disrespected by prospective buyers, or temporarily limiting the sale of soap to one bar per person. ³ The final phase of the work, which is titled ‘Germination’ and is still ongoing, involves using the funds from the soap towards the creation and operation of the Carved to Flow Foundation, a platform ‘dedicated to researching material cultures and fostering shared experimentation and exchange locally.’ ⁴

The title of the installation, Cadence, alludes both to the scope of the work and to its temporal framework. Everything is happening all at once here — time is not represented linearly, but spatially. And it is from this perspective that the flow — the cadence — inherent in the cycle of destruction and creation becomes perceptible. In the pictorial space of the tapestry, the primordial violence of a supernova is already cooling and settling quietly below, where something else has humbly begun to grow. Sculpturally, the ceramic vessels hanging down from the ceiling, which the artist has suggested might each represent an isolated instance in the fall of a teardrop, convey an event suspended indefinitely in the process of unfolding. Similarly, the sonic dimension of the installation has no clear beginning or end. The viewer wanders into something that is somehow both happening and has already happened.

Although there are references to ecological collapse and the violent patterns of resource extraction that catalyse it, it is through the emotional reverberations of these events, as experienced through an identification with the figures in the tapestry, that the viewer enters the work. However, neither we nor the figures are the ‘centre’ of this ensemble; the landscape itself is alive, and Nkanga suggests that, like us humans, it might feel some type of way about existing in this universe (in describing the conception of the hanging sculptures, she recounts: ‘I was then thinking, what if this teardrop actually had a voice? What would it say? How would it say it?’). ⁶

The teardrops, it turns out, have a good deal to say, and at times their outspokenness can be disorienting and overbearing. This exacerbates the sense of fragile balance between the individual elements of the work, and the richness of the tapestry can in certain moments contrast unfavourably with the uncomplicated design of the other sculptural formations, such as the black ropes or the engraved clay tablets. If the installation as a whole comes across as somewhat fragmented, however, one must at the same time commend the artist for what she has created given the limitations of the Atrium as an exhibition space, which displays some characteristics of a non-place; given its location in the museum, visitors inevitably wander through it in order to get somewhere else. The space is furthermore inhospitably lit and too open, and the tapestry wall is flanked annoyingly on one side by a cute green helicopter suspended in mid-air — a senseless addition to the museum’s décor of artworks. Given the scale of the installation, these hindrances are perhaps not to be avoided; nonetheless, I was left wishing I could have seen the piece in an environment that would make it easier to give it the attention it deserves.

Unconcerned with all this, in any case, are the human figures depicted in the tapestry. They could be Adam and Eve, or the last two human beings left on earth, or both — anything seems possible in the collapsed, ambivalent temporal realm they inhabit. Our gaze follows theirs, and the virtual space of the tapestry merges with the real-life space of the Atrium as we contemplate the death and rebirth — unfolding simultaneously — of whoever’s world this is.