Otobong Nkanga

In Pursuit of Bling represents the natural mineral mica, whose name is Latin for ‘crumb’ but is thought to have derived from the Latin ‘micare’, which means ‘to glitter’. Nkanga’s artwork explores mica’s different applications once it has been processed, reflecting on the human desire to turn resources into commodities. Here it is considered as a precious stone that passes from the hands of the miner to those of the consumer, dissolved by industrial processes into products without nobility. She explains that the work “was not only about looking at that material sense of light, but also thinking about it in relation to spirituality and connection to a place, and how we can understand the notion of migration and displacement by thinking about a hole that displaces because of the removal of what it once contained. As the hole is made, the body is displaced.”

In Infinite Yield, the artist used drawings as a starting point and reshaped them on a large scale. Once designed, the tapestry was then produced in the lab of the Tilburg Textile Museum in the Netherlands. The work thematises the natural wealth of our planet and its exploitation dictated by supply and demand in a globalised world. Seeking to expose the relationships between landscape, humanity and labour, the artist also makes active proposals to reflect on contemporary themes such as the possibility of reinterpreting the extracted pits of abandoned mines as underground monuments. The work emerges as a kind of geopolitical understanding of natural resources, a story of people in the chain of transformation and journey of raw minerals, as a metaphor for the relationship between continents. In an age where racial inequality is still surprising present, her work also acts as a mirror, forcing us to reflect on our interactions with the world around us.

Otobong Nkanga (Kano, Nigeria, 1974). She lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium. Nkanga has had solo exhibitions at the Gropius Bau, the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Tate Modern and Tate St Ives, and the Castello di Rivoli, among other institutions. She has participated in the 8th Berlin Biennale in Berlin, Germany, Documenta 14th and the San Paolo Biennale and received a special mention for his presentation at the 2019 Venice Biennale. Nkanga’s work is in the collections of the Center Pompidou, Tate, Stedelijk Museum, Studio Museum in Harlem and Van Abbemuseum for to name just a few.