Otobong Nkanga
In Paris, Otobong Nkanga’s exhibition “I Dreamt of You in Colours” unfolds like a silent narrative, composed of materials, lines, and colors that seem to carry a deep memory.
From the very entrance, something invites you to slow down. Here, you don’t simply look at artworks: you move through inner landscapes.
The galleries host monumental tapestries, delicate drawings, mineral sculptures, and installations in which earth, fabric, metal, and pigment engage in dialogue. Everything seems interconnected. Forms stretch, intersect, and transform, like sensitive maps linking distant territories.
Nkanga never separates the body from the ground, nor humanity from nature.
Color plays a central role. It is never decorative.
It evokes earth, minerals, trade routes, extracted and displaced resources. Deep shades of ochre, blue, black, and red move through the space, telling stories of circulation, loss, and transformation.
Each work acts as a trace, a fragment of a larger narrative.
You move through the exhibition as if through an expanded travel journal. The drawings resemble poetic, almost scientific diagrams, where lines become veins, roots, and fault lines.
The tapestries, for their part, absorb the gaze: their patterns seem to hold time still, preserving the memory of ancient gestures and transmitted knowledge.
Then comes a particular sensation: that of a fragile yet resilient world. Otobong Nkanga speaks of ecology, exploitation, and invisible wounds without ever imposing a direct discourse. Everything is conveyed through material, through slowness, through attention to detail.
Silence becomes a space for reflection.
