Otobong Nkanga

"Humans are only a small, minute part of the ecosystem, but we as beings have forgotten this."

"Your ancestors are part of your life in the present, and they are also the ones who show you the way into the future."

"I don’t like the word “sustainable”, I never did. The whole system has to change."

"I wasn’t expecting this (winning the Nasher Prize for Sculpture), but I am extremely honored."

"A young generation will be able to consider the planet we live in and find ways of repair, connection and love.”"

"I think that everybody has, I hope, or tries to in this lifetime, tries to have a passion of something that you wake up in the morning and and you feel motivated by. You feel that it's necessary for it to be in this world and when we don't find that quest, and when we do not know, it leads to many Questions of existence."

"I'm very interested in the microscopic and the general, and how those two things intersect and play roles and expand our understanding of what we are."

"I am interested in this idea of what your perception is and what the reality of material is and what it can become. You realize how materials can relate to what our memory has registered. What happens if we play with that memory — try to break that perception and rediscover the material? If you touch it or smell it, it breaks our preconceived ideas of what it is."

"The work of Otobong Nkanga makes manifest the myriad connections — historical, sociological, economic, cultural and spiritual — that we have to the materials that comprise our lives."

"Otobong Nkanga maps urgent global problems but does so in subtle, enigmatic, and probing ways. She works with materials that draw on many different aspects of the world's resources, and the complex histories of those materials are embedded in her works. The intense and productive way in which she presents formal and material questions is what marks out her huge contribution to sculpture right now."

"Nkanga's work makes clear the essential place of sculpture in contemporary life."

"Nkanga’s work harnesses sculpture’s capacity to embody experience; uses the Earth’s raw materials to incite feelings such as belonging, nostalgia, retrospection—through objects, through performance, through textiles, drawing, painting, poetry. She affects her audience, while suddenly addressing issues of consumption, globalism, connectivity, and more."

"The prize (Nasher Prize) is awarded to an artist for body of work, for a trajectory, for some sense of promise, for an ability to move the language of sculpture forward, as I think Otobong does, in a very exciting way."

"Nkanga is broadening the concept of sculpture to be a sculpture about the anthropology of materials. Her work has so many trajectories embedded in it, from Arte Povera to tropical architecture."

"I see her (Nkanga) as an artist who works in sculpture, but who works across a variety of mediums and art forms. She produces installations, films, tapestries, drawings, poetry, photography and these are often brought together."