The Museum of Modern Art announces ‘Otobong Nkanga: Cadence’, a new, site-specific commission by the Nigerian-Belgian artist Otobong Nkanga opening in the Donald and Catherine Marron Family Atrium on the 10th of October 2024. The large-scale installation will feature an all-encompassing environment of sculpture, sound, and text that addresses the rhythms of both ecological life cycles and social upheaval. Central to the commission is a monumental tapestry that will be suspended along the highest wall of the Atrium. Hanging sculptures composed of dyed ropes, interwoven with hand-blown glass and ceramic forms, will be suspended floor-to-ceiling within the space and featured alongside ceramic tablets imprinted with poems written by the artist.
Nkanga’s art confronts both the beauty and the degradation of the natural world and its upheaval in the wake of industrial revolutions, resource extraction, and war. The installation weaves together intricate materials, images, and sounds, creating new ways of perceiving and feeling the massive shifts taking place in the world with heart, poetry, and wonder. We are thrilled to feature the work of an artist who uniquely connects global communities and landscapes. The artist speaks of her work as that which connects us to our shared histories, not just through land and geography, but through emotions shaped by events and encounters. These are the cadences of life, formed by turbulence and hope.
The unique, large-scale tapestry will feature a range of custom metallic, natural, and synthetic fibers created by the artist with innovative digital weaving techniques at the TextielLab in Tilburg, the Netherlands. The multi-paneled tapestry will fuse abstract forms with figures that suggest oceanic depths, sprawling ecosystems, and galaxies. A series of veiled images invoking water, shooting stars, bombs in the sky, and plant forms are interwoven throughout the many layers of the tapestry, exploring states of censorship and visibility, and social and ecological turmoil. The space will be filled with an ethereal sound work based on the voice and breath-work of the artist, in which cascading sounds drop from high to low pitch and multiply, producing a polyphony of tones and words and creating a kind of sonic sculpture. These cadences will be accompanied by the artist’s poetic texts inscribed in clay sculptures, as well as a live performance taking place in spring 2025. Nkanga works with both improvisation and virtuosic composition, and she will construct the site-specific installation over several weeks in the Marron Atrium, hand-sculpting and arranging many of the elements. The installation will be on view until the 8th of June 2025.
