OTOBONG NKANCA
The Nigerian artist Otobong Nkanga works in a broad spectrum of media, including performance, installation, photography, drawing and sculpture. Her work takes inspiration from her surroundings, especially architecture, often underscoring the unspoken uses and meanings expressed in built structures. "As part of the scenery of our lives", she explains, "our environment ... shows the lines, scars and traces of decisions made". Each image she creates, "points out the structure isolated in its space, reflecting an aspect of ongoing construction and deconstruction, showing the dreams of individuals, their expectations and deceptions."
The photographs in Road Series (2004), of shanty structures and vacant lots, road signs and barren landscapes, are blurry and bordering on the evanescent. Taken, as the title hints, from a moving car,these fleeting images echo the often improvised and unstable structures that line the roads of her native Nigeria.
A related series, Stripped Bare (2004) is composed of 10 photographs of architectural structures -schools, toilets, churches - photographed in the west of Nigeria. As the artist attests, "The choice of the zone where the images were taken is important; it reflects the actual state of this ... country and continent". The structures themselves, she further explains, "are not ... institutions built by the government, they are personal initiatives from individuals who constructed something for private or public use. The constructions are completely bare of ornaments and are in a state as if stripped, unfinished, or wait- ing for something. Sometimes the size of the structures is not in proportion to the amount of people that live in that area. Sometimes the presence of the structure is unfounded because there was no need for it in that specific area". The strange architecture documented in these images speaks not only of the country itself, but also of a wider set of issues - personal initiative, invention, hope, injustice, decay and failure -all familiar elements of a universal reality.-B.V./E.F.
http://www.galerie-herrmann.de/arts/nkanga/
http://www.universes-in-universe.de/car/habana/bien8/cabana/e-tour-26.htm
Born 1974 in Kano, Nigeria
Lives and works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Lagos, Nigeria; and Paris, France
Untitled (Road Series I-XI, Toll Gate to Baden), 2001
Photography
11 x (40 cm x 60 cm)
Photography
11 x (40 cm x 60 cm)
The Nigerian artist Otobong Nkanga works in a broad spectrum of media, including performance, installation, photography, drawing and sculpture. Her work takes inspiration from her surroundings, especially architecture, often underscoring the unspoken uses and meanings expressed in built structures. "As part of the scenery of our lives", she explains, "our environment ... shows the lines, scars and traces of decisions made". Each image she creates, "points out the structure isolated in its space, reflecting an aspect of ongoing construction and deconstruction, showing the dreams of individuals, their expectations and deceptions."
The photographs in Road Series (2004), of shanty structures and vacant lots, road signs and barren landscapes, are blurry and bordering on the evanescent. Taken, as the title hints, from a moving car,these fleeting images echo the often improvised and unstable structures that line the roads of her native Nigeria.
A related series, Stripped Bare (2004) is composed of 10 photographs of architectural structures -schools, toilets, churches - photographed in the west of Nigeria. As the artist attests, "The choice of the zone where the images were taken is important; it reflects the actual state of this ... country and continent". The structures themselves, she further explains, "are not ... institutions built by the government, they are personal initiatives from individuals who constructed something for private or public use. The constructions are completely bare of ornaments and are in a state as if stripped, unfinished, or wait- ing for something. Sometimes the size of the structures is not in proportion to the amount of people that live in that area. Sometimes the presence of the structure is unfounded because there was no need for it in that specific area". The strange architecture documented in these images speaks not only of the country itself, but also of a wider set of issues - personal initiative, invention, hope, injustice, decay and failure -all familiar elements of a universal reality.-B.V./E.F.
http://www.galerie-herrmann.de/arts/nkanga/
http://www.universes-in-universe.de/car/habana/bien8/cabana/e-tour-26.htm