Accumulating Vocabularies: Parsing Through Otobong Nkanga’s Aesthetic Language

Through an affectionate examination of pigment and clay, an evocative layering of colorful realms on paper; the threading and disentangling nature’s fibers, Otobong Nkanga has constituted a multivalent artistic practice that interrogates human complicity with the Earth and their impact on scarcity of its resources. In this survey essay, the author, Omar Kholeif, navigates the contours of the artist’s 30-year career—arguing that the Nigerian-born, Antwerp-based artist’s aesthetic politics is rooted in an interest in and exploration of languages. In this fantastical realm, the act of voicing routes the reader through a narrative where post-coloniality’s scar tissue is re-visioned as a form of female worlding. Informal tongues, dialects, and speech acts materialize through Nkanga’s performances, her authored clay poems, and all-encompassing installations fashioning new portals for the diasporic imagination. Collectively, hers is an art that proffers an ontological view for nature’s interstitial life forms. Here, stratification is explored as a point of interrogation. Wayward creatures are afforded a stage, if not to breathe amongst humans, then at least, to reveal themselves, for a mere moment.