Places categories: IVAM Centre Julio González

Using not only sculpture, drawing and performance but also writing and pedagogical formats, Otobong Nkanga (Kano, Nigeria, 1974) analyses the notion of ‘earth’ as a geological and discursive formation. She often starts from the systems and procedures used locally to excavate raw materials, processing them technologically and distributing them on a global scale. From this point, she follows the threads that bind together the minerals, material culture and the construction of desire with the redistribution of power and knowledge.

Nkanga’s monographic exhibition will include drawings, installations, photographs, sculptures and performances through which the artist examines our social and topographical relationship with our everyday environment. By exploring the notion of earth as a place of non-belonging, Nkanga provides an alternative significance to social ideas of identity. She also shows the inherent complexities of natural resources and their potential values in order to provoke narratives or histories related to earth.

Stones, cloths and plants are other materials that Otobong Nkanga uses in her installations, permitting her to speak of the earth and the people who inhabit it. The works are always intended metaphorically as symbols of the global system, involving images of migration, transformation, appropriation and loss.

The artist will carry out a site-specific project for Gallery 1 at the IVAM.

From October 2021 to June 2023 our first edition of Art i Context included more than 25 proposals in the form of workshops, conferences, performances, mediations or collaborations in different spaces, inside and outside the museum and online, creating connections between different layers in Valencia and its context. In [DOSMILVINT-I-U] [DOSMILVINT-I-TRES] = 1 encuentro ([TWENTY-TWENTY] [TWENTY-TWENTY-THREE] = 1 encounter), we present work by artists during the course of the programme.

The members of the first edition of Art i Context were Diego Navarro and Darío Alva, Claudia Dyboski, Marina González Guerreiro, Álvaro Porras and M Reme Silvestre. Their practices can be seen as a reaction to the instability of the current moment and to the abstraction of contemporary reality. They use digital tools, construct escapist, speculative narratives, revalue manual work and make critical revisions of historical processes. The exhibition is a continuation of the ideas underpinning the programme, which is seen as a generational encounter and a space for interchanging influences and references outside the museum space.

This exhibition is one of many in our opening up of our programme, which is an open, non-conclusive process in which the momentum of works’s gestation can be seen as an element that generates meaning.

Exhibition information

Trascity is a project that reflects on the roles and spaces we occupy and on the objects we accumulate and collect, including images.

This installation, designed specifically for Gallery 3 at the IVAM, adopts different perspectives in attempt to reformulate the uses of the exhibition space, which will be employed as a replica of an existing place in the outside world, a workplace, a meeting point, an area under construction, an archive of images or a storage room for objects from the past. Trascity makes reference to the contemporary problematics of finding a place in the world, a space where we can explore our anxieties and a refuge where some sort of independence can be gained. In this physical space, the artistic artifact becomes a consumer object.

This project reflects upon the concept of the ‘fragment’, understood from multiple points of view. On the one hand, we have a city created out of a mixture of several, with fleeting memories and everyday annotations in the form of photographs that pile up on top of one another to create unstable architectures denoting a world in collapse, accelerated and decadent. On the other hand, there is the mental fragmentation of a visual artist who performs different roles throughout the day with the goal of facing up to a complex and precarious reality. Appearing in this way are the collector, the hoarder, the photographer, the apprentice… Trascity is a synonym for mutating identity, transformation, the ensnaring city, appropriation, popular culture, the memory store, the passage of time or the mise en abyme.

You can listen to the artist’s Playlist here.