Otobong Nkanga

Otobong Nkanga’s presentation centres around the installation Solid Maneuvers (2015), a manifestation of her encounters with an area devastated by mining in Namibia known as ‘Green Hill’, which, since 1875, has seen its mineral-rich soil hollowed out, leaving a scar in the landscape. Solid Maneuvers, a poeticized translation of Green Hill’s inverted, excavated topography – containing vermiculite, salt, make up, heavy mineral sands and shredded copper – serves as a poignant reminder of the ecological implications of capitalist accumulation. Integrating performance into the work, Nkanga considers how the machinery used for mining these landscapes are informed by the physical gestures of the human body.

The two vertical, sculptural Posts (2019) continue this exploration through photographic documentation of different regions of the world that Nkanga has encountered, allowing visitors to scroll through the carousels of graduating colour, beginning with the green flora and fauna before taking in the greys and browns of decay and abandon (returning, eventually, once again to green). Two hanging works, Steel to Rust – Meltdown (2016) and The Rift (2023) allude to social, economic and industrial corrosion and its physical and emotional repurcussions for the human body and the environment.

Otobong Nkanga foregrounds ecological themes of relationality and becoming through a distilled poetics of entanglement. Her multidisciplinary practice examines the complex social, political, and material relationships between bodies, territories, minerals and the earth. Unsettling the divisions between minimal and conceptual or sensual and surreal approaches, the artist’s researchbased practice constellates humans and landscapes, organic and non-organic matter, Global North and Global South economies. Through drawing, installation, performance, photography, textiles and sculpture, Nkanga creates pathways translating the natural world – its plants, herbs, minerals and living organisms – into networked, aggregated situations evoking memory, labour, home, care, ownership, emotion, touch and smell.

Reframing people and objects as compressed multitudes and as entities that come into being in relation to other entities, Nkanga deftly weaves insights from geology, botany, poetry and non-Western knowledge systems. Her works’ allusions to the reparative potentials of connectivity urgently gesture towards the possibility of more livable futures.

Born in 1978 in USSR

Lives and works in Nottingham, UK

Yelena Popova

This suite of tapestries by Yelena Popova focuses on the prismatic social, political and physical effects of energy, place, elements and monuments. After visiting decommissioned nuclear sites around the UK, including those at Sizewell, Wylfa, Dungeness and Hinkley Point A, she created speculative designs for mausoleums. Popova incorporates the graphite cores of now defunct Magnox reactors, which cannot be moved for almost a century after their use, due to fear of radioactive contamination. Keepsafe I and II (both 2019) caution against historical and future repercussions of fission and fusion, reflecting markers not only for the advent of the Anthropocene – by some standards dated since the first nuclear explosions released excess radiocarbon into our atmosphere – but also for her own biography, having grown up in Ozyorsk, Russia, birthplace of the secretive Soviet nuclear-weapons programme.

Promethean Chalice (2020) combines ancient geometry, astronomy, solar power, mathematics and atomic fusion, proffering sustainable, ecological solutions for utilising nuclear energy. At the centre of the chalice is a torus, a continuous bagel-shaped vortex mirroring the human aura, in which energy flows through the head and loops down to the feet and back up through the body. Influenced by Popova’s mother’s architectural drawings and her father’s knowledge of electricity and chemical reactions, Ripple-Marked Radiance: after Hertha Ayrton (2019) also pays homage to a pioneering British scientist and suffragette, Hertha Ayrton (1854-1923), who became the first female member of the Institution of Electrical Engineers after her late nineteenth-century research into arc lighting.

Yelena Popova works across video, painting, tapestry and performance, exploring the political, the industrial and the chemical. Popova is interested in visibility in all its forms, but specifically political and physical and how these can often overlap. In her paintings and multi-panel installations, Popova uses earth and rocks from the land she inhabits – including soils with heavy mineral, chemical or symbolic properties – to create the pigments with which she paints, infusing her work with actual time and place.

Born in 1982 in Australia

Lives and works in Brisbane, Australia