Curated by Anne Barlow

Otobong Nkanga prominently features materials in her artwork, and not just for their formal aspects: “The tangible makes it possible for you to believe your memory,” she noted in a 2014 interview. The Nigerian-born, Belgium-based artist uses everything from kola nuts to potted plants to trace the ways colonialism has intertwined the global flow of goods with the many fraught individual journeys that add up to mass displacement. One installation on view this autumn at Tate St. Ives, Tsumeb Fragments, 2015, is an assemblage of relics from Nkanga’s journey to the eponymous northern Namibian town, where corporations engaged in large-scale mining efforts—first set in motion by German colonial powers—extracted thirty million tons of minerals from a local hill, leaving it a flooded hole. Mapping the ties between imperialism and resource extraction, trauma and migration, Nkanga’s first UK survey will offer up over ten years of her multidisciplinary practice, including old and new installations, a performance, and a site-specific drawing.

— Dawn Chan