Text by Philippe Pirotte
2010
Born in the northern Nigerian town of Kano and currently based in Antwerp, Otobong Nkanga's drawings, installations, photographs and sculptures variously examine ideas around land and the value connected to natural resources
In the work of Nigerian artist 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.
In this sense, the artist's presence is reminiscent of the self-portraits that Velazquez or Goya included in their bigger history paintings, which exposed the making of the artwork and created an image within an image.
Born in Nigeria and living in Antwerp, Belgium, Nkanga negotiates the completion of the cycle of art between the aesthetic realm of display and a strategy of desublimation that repeatedly pushes the status of the artwork into contingency. In his text about African conceptualism, Okwui Enwezor connected the latter strategy to African traditions.[1] Within a fluid system of exchanges and relationships between object, artist and au- dience, the object is important. When it comes to intention and meaning, however, the object paradoxically functions as an anti-perceptual entity, valuing or mobilising speech and oral communication.
An important project in relation to Nkangas ongoing examination of landscape and the value connected to natural resources beyond their marketability and immediate use was her "re-invention"[2] of "Baggage" (2007-08), a 1972 happening originated by the Ameri- can artist Allan Kaprow. In 1972, Kaprow, along with 20 students from Rice University in Houston, transported bags of sand from a campus construction site to a beach in Galveston, where they evacuated the bags contents and returned with sea sand. The action took place without an audience and the presentation of documentation was the only way in which the happening was translated to an art public. "Baggage" was one of many happenings conducted by Kaprow dealing with the displacement of goods from one place to another. In some of these happenings Kaprow paid attention to the differences in earth colour across America, and the strong contrast he observed when they met.
When Nkanga restaged "Baggage" (2007-08), the (art-historical) notion of "landscape" would take on an importance only vaguely understood in Kaprow's original version. packaged sand from the Netherlands was sent to Lagos and in return sand from Nigeria's Delta region was sent back to the Netherlands. By taking Dutch sand to the dramatically changing landscape of Nigeria, a country rich in oil, Nkanga strongly emphasises the notion of displacement between both continents. In the process, the artist re-politicised Kaprow's original happening. Although it is self- evident that the context of air travel, for both people and goods, has changed dramatically since 1972, the artist did not want to delve directly or too explicitly into the obvious political issues that are connected to the displacement of commodities today. She rather wanted to render a changing landscape hardly visible in a world today where products are transported from one continent to another and where the origins of products (raw materials) have gone through different transformations. As the artist explained in a conversation in August 2008, this work could be a metaphor of a situation where we see "displacement" in a broader context, as not only to the movement of goods, but also human displacement.
In many of her works Nkanga reflects metonymically on the use and cultural value connected to natural resources. Featured on the Studio museum's 2008 exhibition "Flow", her photographic diptych "Alterscapes" (2006) shows the artist as a demiurge, spilling an undefined blue liquid on a landscape. "Contained measures of Tangible memories" (2009), a more recent installation, features two duplicate mobile plinths on top of which the artist has placed five bowls containing mica, black soap, cassia fistula, indigo dye and alum, natural materials that are available in both morocco and Nigeria, but used in completely different ways. The work, shown on the 2009 Arts in marrakech biennial, explores how meaning and function are relative within cultures, and reveals different roles and histories for the same products, particularly within the context of the artist's autobiography and memories. Connected to the domain of art, perversity lingers in the idea that exploitation is fundamental to culture when culture is defined as the adaptation of natural resources towards human ends. Nkanga refrains from entering the realm of the perverse by only creating a vehicle for showing and transporting the resources, she does not make a new product out of them. (She repeated this strategy in her work "Contained measures of Fragments pointe Noire" (2009), which focuses on the specific colours of earth found in pointe Noire, Congo; bags of sand were pierced during the opening of the exhibi- tion and slowly spilled out to shape a new landscape within the installation.)
Nkanga's various photographic works evidence a more documentary approach to the interrogation of the implications of human acts and their effects on varied environments and contexts. In her series "Dolphin Estate" (2008), she photographed a Lagos housing estate that controversially employed prefabricated building techniques. Completed in 1992, Dolphin Estate has," explains the artist, "gradually fallen into a state of disrepair leaving the residents to take care for their daily needs such as water, electricity and deal with flooding problems". Nkanga's photographs show the results and conditions of a long lost dream. The American- sounding name of the housing estate, which comprises two-and three-bedroom flats and four-bedroom duplexes, suggests a suburban utopia, but in reality the buildings are often inadequately equipped. Dwellings are often improvised and added to. Nkanga's photographs show these makeshift alterations, which include large, vividly coloured water tanks precariously installed outside.
On a meta-level "Dolphin Estates" seems to tackle the moral questions connected to the aesthetics of non-architecture and the originality that animates parallel urbanity, as a source of inspiration for artists and archi-tects. Again, as in other works, it is a question that revolves around the paradoxes of exploitation.[3]
Nkanga's 2005 - 06 series of drawings, "Delta Stories", hover between a personal and a universal account of the resource-driven conflicts in the Niger Delta where the local population considers the exploitation of nature as a source of environmental problems and destruction. The positivistic classification of natural things, through observation, measurement and the application of purely quantitative methods, is considered to disrupt our rela- tionship to them and encourage the undesirable attitude that they are nothing more than things to be probed, consumed and dominated. The crisis in the Delta arose in the early 1990s over tensions between foreign oil corporations and a number of the region's minority ethnic groups. Competition for oil wealth, which forms part of an ongoing "scramble for Africa", has fuelled most of the violence, but the conflict is also symptomatic of a clash of opposing world-views. Some drawings resemble topographical maps punctuated by pins (standing for oil wells ?) indexing territorial occupation, although they also indirectly remind one of an animal skin, as a trophy to be taken. The level of abstraction brings to mind the legacy of colonial mapping; at the same time the distanced view invokes the positivism of science and technology, which not only removes our fear of nature, by promising limitless knowledge and power, but also destroys our sense of awe and wonder towards it.
Nkanga's "Delta Stories" (2005 / 06), and related drawing projects, like the "pointe Noire Fragments" (2009) or "Social Consequences I and II" (both 2009), form a meditation on the exploitation of natural resources in a mostly allegorical way. One of the most interesting principles in the artist's drawing method, which I would call a type of organic animation, is that she uses a part of the drawing or an entire sheet to test the colours to be used, these dots appear in a cluster in the top left corner and form a patchwork suffused with everything that comes out of it. It seems as if the drawings set themselves in motion, a characteristic which is most obvious
in "Social Consequences II", a six-page acrylic drawing where the patches give birth to a complete machinery ("The overload"), including corporate buildings with needles that threaten human silhouettes ("projectiles"), which in turn are occupied with an observation device ("piercing pressure"), directly connected to a mechanical apparatus ("hostage") moving disembodied arms extracting resources from the soil ("Wastescape"), and in the end piercing wells that spoil water ("The overflow"). Covering the wide range of changes from human value creation to corporate value extraction, the representations of actions in a narrative, equated with the meanings that lie outside the narrative itself, hint "ex negativo" to the corporate world, which achieved monopoly control, prohibiting locals by law from competing against corporations in extracting resources or selling them goods. [4]
In his later work, German philosopher Theodor Adorno advocated an aesthetic attitude of "sensuous immediacy" towards nature. Adorno borrows the term, which he considers the defining characteristic of art, from Hegel's "Aesthetics" (1885). In his own "Aesthetic Theory"(2004) Adorno considers "the sensuous" as part of aesthetic understanding, which is considered a resistant quality against quantification or a quality that remains after the violence of naming and categorising. Aesthetic understanding makes note of the sensuous, the non-rational, that is
so often dismissed as merely irrational and that cannot be exhausted by rational codification. This means an acknowledgement of the possibilities to be directly and spontaneously acquainted with nature without interventions of our rational faculties. Adorno refers to the "excess" in works of art, something more than their mere materiality and exchange value, which is akin to natural things, and should therefore be able to re- enchant the world through aesthetic experience, which would at the same time be a re-enchantment of lives and purposes. [5]
Otobong Nkanga acknowledges this in her work, but at the same time expresses scepticism. In her recent sculpture, "The Operation" (2008), which Nkanga showed as a part of her "Contained Measures" installation in Las Palmas, she suspended the root of an orange tree from a wall in the Casa Africa gallery. Decorated with Tillandsia plants, the severed root was pierced with long stainless steel needles. A key gesture in Nkanga's work, the piercing was done with scientific precision.
Notes
1. Okwui Enwezor, "Where, What, Who, When: A Few Notes on African Conceptualism", in: Global Conceptualism: points of origin, 1950s - 1980s, (New York: Queens museum of Art, 1999), p.110.
2. It is in the nature of the time- and performance-related work of American artist Allan Kaprow that, in principle, a happening - or an "activity" as he called his work later on - cannot be repeated. Nevertheless, Kaprow himself re-enacted a large number of pieces on several occasions. In the 1980s he made the first "re-inventions", often with surprisingly changed ingredients and outcome. According to Kaprow activities and happenings do not grow old over the years; it is not nostalgic to repeat works but rather a challenge to adapt them to the moment, to the issues and themes, maybe even the fashion of today - as long as the "central metaphor", as he called it, was maintained. By this the works stay contemporary, comparable to the transmissions of content in oral history. See: philippe pirotte, - participation. A Legacy of Allan Kaprow -, in An Invention of Allan Kaprow for the moment, philippe pirotte (Kunsthalle Bern, 2009), p.9.
3. See paola Berenstein Jacques, Esthetique des Favelas, L'harmattan, paris, 2002
4. The corporation, as a virtual entity, mediates all lateral contact between people or small companies and businesses, and it redirects all created value to a select group of investors. According to artist Walead Beshty, corporations are a multitude of voices congealed into a singular entity, a transcription of an ephemeral set of compromises and competing agendas given a unified voice. Beshty further notes Gilles Deleuze's characterisation of the corporation as a spirit and wonders what it means for that ghost to speak. Like most innovations of the colonial era persisting in postcolonial times, that ghost extracts value from the so-called periphery and brings
it back to the so-called centre. See Walead Beshty, "American Ingenuity (And the Failure of the Readymade)", in Afterall magazine No. 17 (Antwerp, London, Los Angeles, 2008), p.23.
5. Some students of Adorno's work have recently argued that his account of the role of "sensuous immediacy" can be understood as an attempt to defend a "legitimate anthropomorphism" that comes close to a weak form of animism. See Jay Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 2001), p.196.