What Is the Sound of a Teardrop? You Can Hear It at MoMA – New York Times

Excerpt:
Otobong Nkanga’s installations can seem simultaneously futuristic and primordial, apocalyptic and utopian. Her latest opens at the museum this week.

Gazing up at the 60-foot wall in the central atrium of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Nigerian artist Otobong Nkanga felt both excited and terrified.

“You look up, and you’re like, ‘Oh my god, where is it going to end?’” she recalled thinking. “I’m always interested in working in spaces that aren’t that easy. This is by far the most crazy space.”

That was her first reaction when she visited the space with the museum’s chief curator-at-large, Michelle Kuo, after receiving a major commission from MoMA to build an installation in its Marron Atrium. The resulting work, “Cadence,” opens on Thursday and runs through June 8, 2025.

Her second reaction, she said, was to sing.

She improvised, starting high and operatic and ending with low tones, listening for reverb and echoes. “How does the voice bounce off the walls and run around the space before it settles on the ground?” she said she wanted to discover. “It’s just like wanting to know where the light falls.”

Nkanga’s voice is often a facet of her site-specific installations, which can seem simultaneously futuristic and primordial, apocalyptic and utopian. They are put together from tapestries, drawings, photographs and ceramics, which she assembles with found natural materials, and sometimes augments with performances and other sensory elements, like scents from herbs and oils.

“My work is connecting all these things and making it clear that it’s all intertwined,” Nkanga said.

She met with The New York Times in September, on the eve of her 50th birthday, in her studio in Antwerp, Belgium, where she has lived since 2007. The main elements of “Cadence” had already shipped, but fragments remained in storage boxes: charcoal-colored ceramic vessels, coils of thick hand-woven rope, spheres of blown glass and test pieces for a shimmering tapestry, which she unfurled on the floor.

Nkanga’s milestone birthday coincides with a moment in the international spotlight. In addition to the high-profile MoMA commission, she was named the 2025 Nasher Prize Laureate, one of the art world’s most prestigious awards, with a $100,000 grant and the opportunity to create a work in the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas in the spring. A major Paris exhibition is scheduled for fall 2025, at the Musée d’Art Moderne.

These honors were “a recognition of the work she’s been doing over many years,” said Alex Logsdail, the chief executive of Lisson Gallery, which represents the artist. “It’s been gradually building. She has had a very significant amount of attention in Europe for some time, and the U.S. is catching up…”