Dallas
On a damp spring weekend, the central installation in Otobong Nkanga’s current exhibition “Each Seed A Body” (on view through August 17, 2025) initially reminded me of a modest stormwater management solution. Along ditches and around construction sites, these barriers appear like long snakes, about a foot in diameter, lumpily stuffed with a fill such as mulch and encased in a woven plastic or compostable mesh. They stretch along in wonky lines, diverting, filtering, and easing the flow of water where runoff and erosion can damage infrastructure or land. Sometimes, in the process of decay, the insides spill out of their casings, fill reuniting with earth.
Nkanga’s work (which shares the exhibition title) looks like it could have a similar mitigative function, resting directly on the floor in an extruded-looking tube. However, it’s not a line—it loops and pools in a loose yet closed ellipse, at one point hoisted straight up to the ceiling and back down. It has an interior and a skin, but as if were peeled inside out. A hemp rope armature is encrusted with a porous mixture of natural materials native to Texas and the Americas, including amaranth grains, cacao nibs, chicory root, coffee beans, corn silk, juniper berry, orange peel, grapefruit peel, sarsaparilla, Texas sorghum, yucca root, and sassafras bark. Along the cord’s length, there is a rhythmic evolution to the colors: one section dark and earthen like compost, becoming a stringy, mottled cream, then a beetroot purple, studded with seeds. It is also punctuated by a number of enormous, milky glass beads in analogous colors. From afar this gives the form the look of an oversize rosary.
Another side of the gallery displays the newest iteration of Carved to Flow (2017–25), Nkanga’s ongoing project first created for documenta 14 in Kassel, Germany, and Athens, Greece, in which she made an edition of soaps sourced with local materials. These were displayed and sold in Germany and the proceeds used to establish an exhibition space in Greece and a foundation in the artist’s native Nigeria, which in part fosters food sovereignty through an organic farm. The version here is a mood board of sorts: since Renzo Piano’s building design precludes direct hanging on the walls, a floating wall holds two staggered shelves, one of which showcases blocks of two new soap editions, plus samples of some ingredients like salt and red clay in delicate piles. The other displays stacks of flat-box packaging to be used for the soaps’ future distribution plus metal soap-making tools. The background wall shows a series of graduated color blocks in reddish tones—lightest at the top to darkest at the bottom—a simplified visualization of the region’s soil strata, which in north Texas is an iron-rich sandstone.
Nkanga’s installations are part laboratory, part landscape. She often presents materials in raw or exposed states, from trees yanked with root systems and clinging soil to blocks of stone, copper sheets, and local plants. But there are also geometries drawn from nature and from traditional African architecture and design—interlocking hexagons, soaps stacked like bricks into turrets, central shared spaces—that form iterative configurations. This sets up a dialectic between construction and extraction that is at the thematic heart of Nkanga’s interests. In what ways do humans disturb and destroy landscapes, and what are the economic, physical, and psychic effects of a disturbed landscape on the people who live and depend on it? The artist has called our current policies of extraction, driven by neocolonialism, a “negation of life.” Sculptures are always, in their way, negations of their own as displaced matter. Can they also be a means for renewal?
Unlike the static presentation of the soap project, there is a simple and effective tension in Each Seed a Body. Are we looking at the intestines of some creature with an appetite for roughage from near and far? If that’s the case, the sculpture is a kind of autopsy. But the dense admixture on the rope is also somehow heartening—like the instinctive joy of a dough formed in the hands. It is a teeming clinging together of matter in the midst of transformation.
