Share this article:
The must-see exhibition I Dreamt of You in Colors by Otobong Nkanga opened to the public last week at MCBA Lausanne. Rather than a conventional retrospective, the exhibition is presented as a living ecosystem of forms, histories, and materials. Conceived in close collaboration with the artist Otobong Nkanga, the exhibition offers a rare transversal view of Nkanga’s practice from its early stages to her most recent works, weaving together installations, drawings, textiles, photographs, and sculptural assemblages into a dense and sensorial narrative.
DOES NKANGA DREAM IN COLOR?
Nkanga’s practice has long been explored the intersection of land, body, and resource. Born in Kano and shaped by transnational trajectories between Nigeria and Europe, her work inspired by places affected by the extraction of materials, history, and emotions. Yet rather than staging a didactic critique, Nkanga constructs environment in which these conditions are felt as tensions, frictions, and flows.
Her materials are never neutral. Minerals, pigments, textiles, and organic substances act as conduits of memory, bearing the traces of geological time and colonial violence.
Nkanga’s practice focuses on the complex relationship between land, body, and natural resources. She explores how the histories of colonialism, extraction, and global trade are embedded in materials such as minerals, soil, plants, and pigments. In her work these materials active carriers of memory, trauma, and transformation.
A key aspect of her approach is considering the Earth as a living archive. Through layered installations and performances, she explores how landscapes are altered by human activity, emphasizing the process of repair, regeneration, and interconnectedness.
She gained major international recognition after winning the Special Mention at the Venice Biennale in 2015 and Belgian Art price in 2017, and her work has been exhibited widely across major institutions in Europe and beyond.
Today, Nkanga is widely regarded as one of the most significant in contemporary artist, known for her exploration of ecological themes, postcolonial ideas, and the exploration of material histories.
The exhibition adopts a stratigraphy, (the branch of geology focused on the study, description, and mapping of layered rocks to interpret Earth’s history, geological time scales, and spatial relationships), as both a method and a display technique.
Layers, which can be visual, material, or temporal, accumulate without resolving into a single narrative. Intimate, early drawings are placed in close proximity to expansive installations, creating an echo of gestures across time. This non-hierarchical arrangement destabilizes distinctions between origin and outcome, sketch and structure, process, and form. What is foregrounded instead is a condition of continuous becoming, which is characterized by perpetual transformation and evolution.
Color, as invoked in the exhibition’s title, functions not merely as a visual register but as a mode of transmission. It indexes the transformation of matter into pigment, landscape into surface, experience into abstraction. In Nkanga’s work, color is both residue and agent, it is an active element within a broader ecology of exchange.
The exhibition expands beyond individual objects within the MCBA Lausanne’s architectural framework to create a relational topography. Bodies move through textures, densities, and chromatic fields that demand a slowed, attentive mode of observation.
The viewer is implicated not as a passive observer, but as a participant with a network of material and symbolic exchanges.
I dream you in colors ultimately proposes an exhibition as an infrastructure of relationships: a space where histories accumulate, materials communicate, and forms remain in flux. Rather than offering resolution, Nkanga constructs a condition in which the boundaries between land and body, memory, and matter, are continually reimagined.
The exhibition runs until August 28, 2026 and there are two dates to note during that period when artist will perform at the museum: Thursday, May 28 ,and Saturday, May 30, 2026.
