Artist talk with Suzanne Jackson, Jota Mombaça & Otobong Nkanga (EN)
On the occasion of the opening of Magical Realism: Imagining Natural Dis/order, participating artists Suzanne Jackson, Jota Mombaça, and Otobong Nkanga come together in conversation to explore their artistic approaches and their engagement with the body, the environment and materiality.
Through the prism of these three singular practices, the talk reflects on our relationship with the planet amid global and ecological shifts. Challenging the logics of extractive growth systems, the artists invite us to recover connections with the living world.
The talk is moderated by WIELS curator Sofia Dati.
Biographies:
Otobong Nkanga (b. 1974, Nigeria) lives and works in Antwerp. Her multidisciplinary practice examines the complex social, political, ecological 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. She presented a new, site-specific commission at MoMA, New York (2024), and has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Institut Valencià d’Art Modern (2023); Frist Art Museum, Nashville (2023); SintJanshospitaal, Bruges (2022); Kunsthaus Bregenz (2021); Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2021); and Villa Arson, Nice (2021). Nkanga is the 2025 Nasher Prize Laureate and was the recipient of the Golden Afro Artistic Award in the Visual Arts (2024) and the inaugural Lise Wilhelmsen Art Award Programme (2019).
Jota Mombaça (b. 1991, Brazil) lives and works between Lisbon and Amsterdam. She is an interdisciplinary artist whose work unfolds in a variety of mediums. The sonic and visual matter of words plays an important role in her practice, which often relates to anti-colonial critique and gender disobedience. In 2021, she published the book Não vão nos matar agora (They won’t kill us now). She recently completed a residency at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. Her work has been presented in several institutional frameworks, such as the 32nd and 34th São Paulo Biennials (2016 and 2020), 22nd Biennale of Sydney (2020), 10th Berlin Biennale (2018) and 46th Salón Nacional de Artistas in Colombia (2019). Currently, she is interested in researching elemental forms of sensing, anti-colonial imagination and the relation between opacity and self-preservation in the experience of racialised trans artists in the Global Art World.
Suzanne Jackson (b. 1944, USA) lives and works between Savannah and St Rémy. For nearly five decades, the artist has worked experimentally across mediums, including drawing, painting, poetry, dance, theatre and costume design. In the early 1970s, Jackson worked as an artist and teacher in Los Angeles, where she engaged a community of artist peers and established Gallery 32, showcasing figures like David Hammons, Senga Nengudi and Betye Saar. During this time, Jackson was known for her figurative paintings using layers of watercolour-like acrylic wash to depict the melding of humans and nature. Jackson’s recent works – which she calls ‘environmental abstractions’ – consists of pure acrylic and found materials, dispensing with canvas and allowing the paintings to move off the wall and function from all sides. The artist’s first major retrospective (2025) is travelling from SFMOMA to the Walker Art Center and MFA Boston.