Otobong Nkanga

Cadence

Otobong Nkanga has been working with the TextielLab for over ten years. She also mentors young talent through the lab’s Advanced Textile Program. In 2021, she made a series of striking woven tapestries for a major solo exhibition at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria. This year, she worked with Stef Miero in the lab on Cadence, an equally striking tapestry measuring approximately 20 metres high and 11 metres wide for MoMa in New York. The tapestry has been hanging on the highest wall of the atrium since October 2024, where it will remain until the summer of 2025.

Cadence confronts both the degradation and resilience of the universe – from the depths of the earth to the stars in the sky and everything in between. The work was produced in three parts on the 350-cm-wide loom. It comprises four layers and 12 wefts of different yarns, creating four palettes of 234 colours. The four layers presented a significant challenge because of the size of the fabric. A gym hall was rented specially to lay out, check and finish the woven sections before they went to New York. By pushing the floating warp threads of the tapestry’s top layer to one side, Nkanga exposed the layers underneath, creating an extraordinary feeling of depth.

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Photos by Wim van Dongen and Emile Askey