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Otobong Nkanga: The Breath from Fertile Grounds
Temple Bar Gallery Dublin
8 December to 10 February
The network is integral to Otobong Nkanga's practice. It is what connects one idea to another, what turns conversation into collaboration, labour into goods, research into realisation. The network finds its form in her visualisation of unseen, intangible channels, distributing information and objects while incrementally transforming them in the process, and in her cultivation of a variety of disparate, even contradictory, readings around a chosen material. In Nkanga's previous works, precious metals served to represent both the economic and the aesthetic, denoting value as commodities (as forms of currency but also as components in computers and smartphones) and as decoration, while pointing to her own cultural background as a Nigerian based in Antwerp, a hub of the world's diamond trade. As Natasha Ginwala has written: 'the mineral morphs into performative terrain - as groundwork - across Nkanga's work and into a testimonial subject, interwoven with the artist's biography.' Recounting Nkanga's youth in Nigeria, her habit of drawing images in mica on the asphalt pavements, and her hobby of collecting minerals, Ginwala also acknowledges that...