Otobong Nkanga — I dreamt of you in colours — Musée d’Art Moderne de la ville de Paris — Exhibition — Slash Paris

In about 2 months: Friday, October 10, 2025

From 10 October 2025 to 22 February 2026

“I think of the Earth as a being, like our body: water, air, tree, stone, plant are beings like our body.”

The Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris is featuring the artist Otobong Nkanga’s first monographic exhibition in a Parisian museum in fall 2025.

Since the late 1990s, Otobong Nkanga (born in Kano, Nigeria in 1974 and now living in Antwerp, Belgium) has been addressing themes related to ecology and relationships between the body and the territory in her practice, creating powerful and visually impressive artworks.

Drawing upon her own personal history and her research bearing witness to an array of transhistorical influences, she creates networks and constellations between humans and landscapes, while broaching the reparative capacity of natural and relational systems.

Following her studies at the Obafemi Awolowo University of Ife-Ife in Nigeria, then the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-arts de Paris and the artist residency of Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, the artist has been interrogating the notion of exploitation, both of the soil and the body, as it relates to space, the earth, and its resources. She examines the social, political, historical, and economic relationships at work in our connection to territory, materials, and nature through the production of a multidisciplinary practice (paintings, installations, tapestries, performances, poetry, etc.).

The concept of strata is central to the artist’s work—both in the materiality of her sculptures, interventions, performances, and tapestries, but also her way of thinking about the relationships between bodies and lands—relationships of exchange and mutual transformation. Otobong Nkanga explores the circulation of materials and goods, people, and their intertwined histories, as well as their exploitation, marked by the residue of environnemental violences. While questioning memory, she offers a vision of a possible future.

Bringing together emblematic installations, series of photographs, recent works, and a great number of drawings, some of which date to the early years of her career and have never been on view until now, the exhibition offers a cross-section of Otobong Nkanga’s protean oeuvre, spanning her career from its beginnings to the present. It follows a genealogy of recurring subjects (such as mining extraction or the various uses and cultural values tied to natural resources) in a body of ever-evolving visual work. For the occasion, the artist has reactivated some emblematic works, adding new elements to them in a site-specific poetics of entanglement, thereby creating connections between forms, materials, or ideas.

The works featured come from French and international public collections (Castello di Rivoli in Rivoli, Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Beyeler Foundation in Basel, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter in Sandvika, M HKA à Anvers, Centre Pompidou in Paris) and private collections as well as the artist’s studio. The major work From Where I Stand (2015), which was acquired at the Friends of the Musée d’Art Moderne gala banquet in 2022, will also be on view in the exhibition.

Exhibition catalogue

In addition to three essays (Noam Gramlich, Sandrine Honliasso, Maya Tounta), the bilingual (French/English) catalogue published by Paris Musées will include a long interview between the artist and the curators. Installation views of the site-specific works will complement the section devoted to reproductions.

Organized with the artist and in collaboration with the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne, the exhibition will run from October 10, 2025 to February 22, 2026 in Paris, and then from April 3 to August 23, 2026 in Lausanne.