Otobong Nkanga

The award ceremony

On Monday 26 October 2026, Otobong Nkanga was awarded the Sikkens Prize 2026 at Singer Laren. The award ceremony was presented by Tracy Metz and featured a varied programme, including a welcome address by Doede Hardeman, director of Singer Laren, and Lennart Booij, chair of the Sikkens Foundation; a film about the Sikkens Prize by Gerrit Schreurs; the reading of the jury report by writer Rashid Novaire; and a mesmerising performance by the Swedish vocal artist and singer Sofia Jernberg.

Architect Afaina de Jong delivered the 2026 Mondrian Lecture, followed by a laudatory speech by curator of contemporary art Mirjam Westen. The prize, an award designed by Winnie Teschmacher, was then presented by Maarten de Vries, CFO of AkzoNobel, and Hester Alberdingk Thijm, director of the AkzoNobel Art Foundation, both of whom are board members of the Sikkens Foundation.

The jury report was written by Rashid Novaire, writer and board member of the Sikkens Foundation.

Use of prize money

The Sikkens Prize comes with a prize of €75,000, of which €50,000 is intended for personal development and €25,000 for a special project involving colour. After accepting the prize, Otobong Nkanga announced that she would donate the entire sum to the Carved to Flow Foundation in Nigeria.

Exhibitions

For the first time, the Sikkens Foundation honours the Sikkens Prize laureate with an exhibition. Otobong Nkanga’s solo exhibition Humus Blues is on view from 27 October 2026 to 28 February 2027 at Singer Laren. In her work she explores the interconnection between people, landscape and raw materials, as well as themes such as identity, power and change. Featuring sculptures, textiles, drawings, paintings, photographs and poetry, the exhibition offers a multifaceted introduction to her body of work, in which colour plays a key role – a quality for which the Sikkens Prize jury has recognised her.

Monumental works by Nkanga are also on display in the 30-year anniversary exhibition ReflAction at the Art Space of the AkzoNobel Art Foundation in Amsterdam.

About Otobong Nkanga

Otobong Nkanga shows where colour truly comes from. In her sculptures, tapestries, drawings and installations – shown from Paris and Lausanne to Kanazawa, New York and Venice – pigments and minerals are not passive matter but active witnesses: of landscapes and lives, of extraction and reconstruction. Her work connects body and landscape, the local and the global, the personal and the political. Her artistic practice thus aligns closely with the mission of the Sikkens Prize.

Otobong Nkanga has had solo exhibitions at institutions including MAM in Paris and MCBA Lausanne (exhibition I dreamt of you in colours), Kunsthaus Bregenz, Castello di Rivoli in Turin, Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp and MoMA in New York. Nkanga has also participated in major international exhibitions, including the Biennale Arte 2026 in Venice, documenta 14 in Kassel and the Sydney Biennial. She has received numerous prestigious awards, including the Sharjah Biennial 14 Prize (2019) and the 2025 Nasher Sculpture Prize.