Established in 2015, the Nasher Prize is an award dedicated exclusively to excellence in contemporary sculpture.
Winners of the Nasher Prize embody the tenets of the award: to recognize a living artist whose body of work has had an extraordinary impact on our understanding of sculpture. Their work represents the pinnacle of achievement in the medium, extending its expressive possibilities and often expanding upon the notion of what sculpture is or can be.
Through a broad range of materials, used to orchestrate an equally broad range of artistic practices, the 2025 Nasher Prize Laureate, Otobong Nkanga, weaves together powerful works that delve into the complex, often fragile relationships between humans, the land, and its resources, touching on issues of consumption, global circulation, connectivity, and care.
Nasher Sculpture Center announces ‘Nasher Prize Dialogues: Sculpture and Organic Material’ presented in partnership with the Municipal Museum of Contemporary Art (S.M.A.K.) in Ghent, Belgium.
This program brings together 2025 Nasher Prize laureate Otobong Nkanga and artist Precious Okoyomon to discuss their use of organic matter in sculptures and installations, often creating sensory worlds inside of museums and galleries. Through a shared use of plants, herbs, stones, and other raw materials, the artists’ two distinct practices manifest in spaces that envelope their audiences beyond visual planes, pushing the multi-dimensional qualities of sculpture.
The conversation will be moderated by independent curator Fabian Flückiger.
Biography Otobong Nkanga
Otobong Nkanga, was born in Kano, Nigeria in 1974, grew up in Lagos and Paris, and lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium.
Otobong Nkanga began her art studies at the Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ife, Nigeria, and later continued her studies in Paris at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. She has been artist-in-residence at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam (2002-2004) and she finished her Masters in the Performing Arts at DasArts, Advanced Research in Theatre and Dance Studies, Amsterdam (2005-2008). Furthermore she has been artist-in-residence at the DAAD Berlin (2014) and at Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin (2019).
Over the past 20 years she has been producing evocative works that speak to migration and her own movement in the world, the exhaustive use of planetary resources, and the interconnectedness of people and the land. Her enigmatic art, which relies on extensive research into the places it inhabits, frequently uses raw materials such as minerals, metals, stones, and plants to elicit new meanings, stored memories, and emotional connections for her audience.
Biography Precious Okoyomon
Precious Okoyomon is an artist and writer born in 1993 in London, UK, and living and working in New York. She attended Shimer College in Chicago. Her work was included in the 13th Baltic Triennial, and in a two-person exhibition with Hannah Black at Real Fine Arts, New York. Okoyomon has read at The Kitchen, New York, Artist’s Space, New York, and The Serpentine Galleries, London. Her work is included in the permanent collection of the Rubell Family Collection. Her first book of poetry, Ajebota (2016), was published by Bottlecap Press, and her second book, But Did U Die?, is forthcoming from Wonder Press in 2019.
Biography Fabian Flückiger
Fabian Flückiger, born 1987 in Berne (Switzerland), lives and works in Berne and Brussels. After holding various institutional positions (Zentrum Paul Klee, Berne; Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain, Geneva; Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen; Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein), he has been working as a freelance curator since 2021. He has realised exhibitions and publications on Nora Turato (2019), Steven Parrino (2020), Miriam Laura Leonardi (2021), Manon de Boer (2022), ektor garcia (2022) and Fatima Moallim (2023), among others. Most recently, he collaborated with Belgian institutional collections for the major thematic exhibition This Is Us at Z33 in Hasselt, which also included commissioned works (2023). He was a guest critic at the ISCP in New York and taught at the F+F School of Art and Design in Zurich and at the école de recherche graphique (ERG) in Brussels. He is currently working on exhibition projects for Kunstforum Baloise, Basel, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, Marietta Clages, Cologne, and Simian, Copenhagen. He is a jury member of the Swiss Art Awards.
