Description

Nkanga’s poetry and drawings, further facets to her multidisciplinary practice, continue her exploration of humanity’s relationship to the land.

Following her monumental atrium commission for the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Stitched Dreams looks at 30 years of drawing, painting and poetry by Nigerian Belgian artist Otobong Nkanga. Created concurrently with her larger installations, tapestries and performances, the drawings underpin the manifold forms of her creative output and continue her use of bright, natural colors, while her poems have been set down on everything from fired clay tablets to textiles.

Delving into the artist’s ritualistic practice of mind-mapping, readers are invited to explore the cultural and historical references that inflect Nkanga’s interest in legacies of empire, the earth’s natural resources, the weight of memory and the human imagination’s possibility to conjure social change. The title, Stitched Dreams, comes from the name of her first drawing, made in 1994. Otobong Nkanga (born 1974) grew up in Lagos and Paris and is currently based in Antwerp. She studied fine and performing arts at Obafemi Awolowo University in Ife-Ife, the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and DasArts in Amsterdam. Nkanga received the Special Mention Award at the 58th Venice Biennale.

The book includes contributions by Omar Kholeif, an Egyptian-born artist and writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, BBC, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, GQ, the Economist, the Art Newspaper, Vice and others. Teju Cole is a Nigerian American writer, photographer, art historian and photography critic.