Accumulating Vocabularies

Through an affectionate examination of pigment and clay, an evocative layering of colorful realms on paper, and the threading and disentangling of nature's fibers, Otobong Nkanga has constituted a multivalent artistic practice that interrogates human complicity with the Earth and its impact on scarcity of its resources. In this survey article, the author navigates the contours of the Nigerian-born, Antwerp-based artist's thirty-year career, arguing that her 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 postcoloniality's scar tissue is revisioned as a form of female worlding. Informal tongues, dialects, and speech acts materialize through Nkanga's performances, her authored clay poems, and the 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 among humans, then at least to reveal themselves for a mere moment.