Zeitz MOCAA presented Otobong Nkanga with the 2025 Zeitz MOCAA Honorary Award for Artistic Excellence in February. This award recognises an art industry luminary who has made exceptional contributions to the art ecology and the museum.
The Zeitz MOCAA Honorary Awards are a tribute to visionaries whose contributions are essential to the thriving contemporary art scene on the Continent. Their impact resonates far beyond artistic realms, inspiring positive change and fostering cultural dialogue. The annual Gala raises funds in support of the museum’s curatorial and education programming.
The Gala is the museum’s annual fundraiser and a much anticipated event in the Cape Town art calendar. This elegant gathering plays a crucial role in advancing the institution’s mission to exhibit, collect, preserve and research contemporary art from Africa and its Diaspora. Proceeds from the Gala directly benefit the museum’s curatorial and education programme, enabling the institution to conceive and host international exhibitions; develop supporting educational, discursive and enrichment programmes; encourage intercultural understanding; and ensure access for all.
Koyo Kouoh, Executive Director and Chief Curator of Zeitz MOCAA had this to say, “The Honorary Award for Artistic Excellence recognises an exceptional individual who has forged an indelible impression on the contemporary art landscape in Africa and the Diaspora. It is a privilege to present this prestigious award to a prolific industry luminary such as Otobong Nkanga.”
Otobong Nkanga’s multidisciplinary practice examines the complex social, political, ecological and material relationships between bodies, territories, minerals and the earth. Unsettling the divisions between minimal and conceptual or sensual and surreal approaches, the artist’s research-based practice constellates humans and landscapes, organic and non-organic matter.
Through drawing, installation, performance, photography, textiles and sculpture, Nkanga creates pathways translating the natural world – its plants, herbs, minerals and living organisms – into networked, aggregated situations evoking memory, labour, home, care, ownership, emotion, touch and smell.
Reframing people and objects as compressed multitudes and as entities that come into being in relation to other entities, Nkanga deftly weaves insights from geology, botany, poetry and non-Western knowledge systems. Otobong’s works allusions to the reparative potentials of connectivity, urgently gesture towards the possibility of more livable futures.
Koyo Kouoh offered laudatory remarks at the awards ceremony in recognition of Otobong Nkanga’s exceptional contributions to the art ecology and the museum. Kouoh has been leading Zeitz MOCAA on a transformative journey since May 2019. Prior to this appointment, she was the founding Artistic Director of RAW Material Company, a centre for art, knowledge and society in Dakar, Senegal. Kouoh was appointed by the Board of La Biennale di Venezia, upon the recommendation of President Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, as Director of the Visual Arts Department to curate the 61st International Art Exhibition to be held in 2026.
At Zeitz MOCAA, Kouoh’s curatorial work focuses on in-depth solo exhibitions by African and African-descent artists. As such, she has co-curated (alongside Precious Mhone) Otobong Nkanga’s ‘Acts at the Crossroads’ (2019). She has organised meaningful and timely exhibitions, and, active in the critical field of the arts community in a pan-African and international scope, Kouoh has a remarkable list of publications under her name. Kouoh is the recipient of the Grand Prix Meret Oppenheim 2020, the Swiss Grand Award for Art that honours achievements in the fields of art, architecture, critique, and exhibitions.
The Zeitz MOCAA Gala 2025 is proudly supported by BMW South Africa, Don Julio, Hazendal Wines, YourLuxury Africa, and The Aleit Group.
