I dreamt of you in colours: Otobong Nkanga's exhibition at the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris

The Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris honors Otobong Nkanga with his first monographic exhibition in the capital, "I dreamt of you in colours", combining installations, drawings and unpublished works, from October 10, 2025 to February 22, 2026.

Immerse yourself in a universe where art intimately links human beings and nature... Artist Otobong Nkanga takes over the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris with I dreamt of you in colours, an exhibition weaving sensitive relationships between humans and their environment, from October 10, 2025 to February 22, 2026.

Nurtured by a transhistorical and intercultural approach, his work tackles themes such as ecology, memory, the circulation of materials and the exploitation of resources, while questioning our relationship with the land. "I think of the Earth as a being, like our body: water, air, tree, stone, plant are beings like our body", sums up the artist.

A body of work shaped by an international career

Born in Kano, Nigeria, in 1974 and based in Antwerp, Otobong Nkanga studied atObafemi Awolowo University, theÉcole nationale supérieure des Beaux-arts in Paris and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. Since the late 1990s, she has been developing a multidisciplinary practice - paintings, installations, tapestries, performances, poetry - in which the notion of strata plays a central role.

His works materialize exchanges between bodies and lands, explore the circulation of goods, histories and knowledge, and highlight the traces of environmental violence while outlining prospects for reparation.

I dreamt of you in colours, a journey through archives and original creations

The exhibition brings together emblematic installations, series of photographs, previously unseen drawings and recent works. Theexhibition at the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris offers a cross-section of his production, tracing the genealogy of recurring subjects such as mining and the cultural uses of natural resources.

Some pieces are reactivated with new elements created in situ, in a poetic of entanglement. The works come from public and private collections in Europe, including the Castello di Rivoli, the Stedelijk Museum, the Fondation Beyeler and the Centre Pompidou, as well as from the artist's studio.

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