The artist and curator reflect on one of Art Basel’s most significant projects and how it continues to resonate, six years later

Otobong Nkanga and Hans Ulrich Obrist on ecology, lockdowns, and ‘14 Rooms’

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When asked about her favorite memory of Art Basel, the gallerist Sadie Coles replied, ‘“Il Tempo del Postino” in 2009 and “14 Rooms” in 2014: These were the years when the Art Basel projects were of such an ambitious scale that they emphasized why Art Basel is, for me, the world’s most extraordinary, challenging, and agenda-setting art fair.’‘Il Tempo del Postino’ and ‘14 Rooms’ mark important steps in Art Basel’s 50-year history. These hybrid events, which were articulated around performance-based artworks, were realized in collaboration with the Manchester International Festival, as well as Fondation Beyeler and Theater Basel.&nbsp;Each edition of curators Hans Ulrich Obrist and Klaus Biesenbach’s ‘Rooms’ project (it was also staged in 2012 as ‘12 Rooms’ for the Ruhrtriennale in Germany and in 2013 as ‘13 Rooms’ for Kaldor Public Art Projects in Australia) was adapted to reflect its site-specific context. Blurring the line between audience and artwork, ‘14 Rooms’ offered visitors the opportunity to walk in on or trigger performances, rather than experience them according to a set time frame.In Basel, this meant four new commissions along with an artist list that spanned three generations and four continents. It featured&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/7800/Marina-Abramovi%C4%87" target="_blank">Marina Abramović</a>, Tino Sehgal,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/13367/Dominique-Gonzalez-Foerster" target="_blank">Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster</a>,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/6870/Xu-Zhen" target="_blank">Xu Zhen</a>,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/7467/Joan-Jonas" target="_blank">Joan Jonas</a>,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/7466/Ed-Atkins" target="_blank">Ed Atkins</a>,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/6945/Bruce-Nauman" target="_blank">Bruce Nauman</a>, and Otobong Nkanga. On the occasion of Art Basel’s 50th anniversary, Obrist and Nkanga connected over Zoom to reflect on ‘14 Rooms’ and how lockdowns around the world have had an impact on the way performance-based work is thought about and staged.

Hans Ulrich Obrist: ‘14 Rooms’ was about the relationship between space, time, and physicality, but also about living sculptures. With performance, there is a fixed time – the performance lasts from 6 to 7pm or from 8 to 8:30pm – and Klaus and I were interested in the idea of ongoing performances and interactive pieces. Visitors could come any time during the day and would encounter a new situation in each of the 14 rooms. I want to revisit your extraordinary piece, Diaspore, and talk about how you came to it.


	Otobong Nkanga: When you invited me to be part of ‘14 Rooms’ I thought it would make sense to expand the piece I was working on at the time, which was related to a work called Taste of a Stone. Taste of a Stone started in 2010 as an installation at Kunsthal Charlottenborg [in Copenhagen], but later on I expanded the work because, as an installation only, it felt like something was lacking. It needed to be expanded so the body would start connecting with the elements – the stones, the soil, and the plants – in the space. In 2013, when I performed Taste of a Stone: Itiat Esa Ufok in Sharjah [in the United Arab Emirates], I added the Queen of the Night plant on top of my head. That plant is connected to my childhood in Nigeria, but I found it in the Emirates, so I thought it made sense to perform with it.


	For ‘14 Rooms’, I wanted to extend the work to other women, particularly women who confirmed they have African heritage, and in that way connect to how I see myself, an African woman, as well as think I through the diaspora. The idea of movement made sense in relation to the diaspora and the plant itself, which is actually from the West Indies but has moved through and arrived in many other places, such as Southeast Asia, Australia, and behind my house in Nigeria. I wanted to create a piece about the idea of di – a word-forming element of Greek origin meaning two, split, or double – and dia, also of Greek origin, meaning through, across, or from point to point, and then the spore, which is like a seed.


	HUO: ‘14 Rooms’ was also an extremely physical exhibition, it had a lot to do with being present. It was about the body, about many different ways of being together in a space. It was the opposite of our current reality, where we’re mostly communicating by Zoom.


	ON: With the lockdown, I’ve been thinking a lot about how one continues performing, how one brings the body into a space where everyone is worried about this invisible element that goes through nostrils. During ‘14 Rooms’, we never thought about one person standing next to another – one could easily enter Marina Abramović’s performance, Luminosity [1997/2014], which had a naked performer breathing and sweating in a room [while sitting on an elevated bicycle seat fixed to a wall]. But now, for example, I’m showing Diaspore at Gropius Bau in Berlin and I had to rethink how to show it – how to create distance between the performers and to be more aware of the visitors coming in and out.

HUO: Let’s talk more about the plants in your work, especially with the ecological crisis we’re experiencing. [Academics] such as Emanuele Coccia and Stefano Mancuso have written about the lives of plants and how we often don’t respect them, how we just put plants somewhere in a room and don’t acknowledge them. Coccia and Mancuso say we need another form of dialogue with plants, and the dialogue you establish with plants shows that we need a different relationship to the planet. Can you talk about how you work with plants, especially Queen of the Night, which only blooms at night, and the dialogue between the human and the plant?


	ON: Well, I don’t make a separation. I call all these different entities ‘bodies.’ The plant is connected to the soil, and without the soil many things would not exist – we would not exist. For me, it’s interesting to think about the interconnection between us and an element that we eat, that we walk past, that we don’t necessarily think about. It’s important to see that the plant has the same importance as our body, and if the soil is not right, the plants do not grow. If the soil is contaminated, it affects what we eat, it affects the way we connect to the landscape. It was interesting to bring these other bodies – water, soil, plants, air, minerals – into my works as ways of thinking through and connecting the human body to the things that constitute who we are, that are as important as our skin and our breathing.


	With Diaspore and the Queen of the Night plant, there is an important relationship to the autobiographical space. Every night, when I was a kid in Nigeria, we would smell the Queen of the Night blossoming. That relation to smell, to the notion of the queen, to something that makes you remember its existence every night, is very strong. I wouldn’t notice the plant, but I would notice the smell. The plant being on the head of a performer is also important because the plant becomes similar to a crown. The notion of the queen then starts entering the posture of the body – the body has to hold the pot and that forces the performer to take the posture of a queen.


	HUO: Herzog &amp; de Meuron created an exhibition architecture with mirrors so the rooms could be mirrored to infinity. In your room, you added another layer – a topographic map on the floor, which was almost like looking at the land from above. You were mapping the bodies that performed in the space, but also the bodies that entered the space.


	ON: In order to emphasize the displacement or movement of bodies from one place to another, it can help to think of the world as a topographic map of pylons and places that are low, where the water flows, where the rivers and streams are passing by. Adding this map to the floor was a very graphic way of expanding the idea of the diaspora or the movement of people.&nbsp;

UO: How did you feel about Herzog &amp; de Meuron’s architecture?ON: I went through different emotions. The first time I arrived, I was shocked to see how the room felt expanded and how the use of the mirrors allowed one to look ‘beyond.’ But I was also nervous about looking at myself in a mirror because I don’t like looking at my own reflection. This always brings us to the narcissist, or back to the self. What I did enjoy was the way they divided the space and how the area in the middle allowed for a lot of people to move around before entering each room.They designed it so that once you opened a door, you entered a world – and you couldn’t leave that world. You either got into that world or ran out, there wasn’t an ‘in between,’ it didn't leave you indifferent. In my room, the space created a place where people calmed down and contemplated, relaxed, and sometimes became quite emotional. I think the design – the wall, the door, looking at oneself – allowed the visitor to reset before entering each room.HUO: What rooms are strongest in your memory?ON: One room that I still connect with is Roman Ondak’s Swap, which was about exchange. You’d have something with you and go in, and then you’d have to sit down and barter – you’d exchange something and then it would continue and continue. Another work that has stayed with me is Ed Atkins’s No-one is More 'Work' Than Me with the performing robot, and also Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s piece, R.145. I won’t say too much about her work because you are meant to experience it, but it forced you to be on your own until something happened, and recently we’ve been in a situation where we’ve had to be on our own. With the lockdown, we were contained within spaces, and I think that piece works very well when thinking about how we manage and work within a space that is on lockdown.HUO: My last question is one that I ask in all my conversations and have asked you many times before – can you tell me about an unrealized project that is dear to you?ON: I would like to have a farm in Nigeria. I’ve already gotten the land, but it will be a lifetime project. I’d like to have goats and a place where there can be healing, where we can connect with younger generations, and where we can find ways to work with local materials. This is the dream I’m working towards – a place where you can still make things, but a place that’s connected to the landscape, to people, to plants, to animals&hellip;A farm.

Top image:&nbsp;Otobong Nkanga in front of her work Double Plot, included in 'Otobong Nkanga: There's No Such Thing as Solid Ground', Gropius Bau, Berlin, 2020.&nbsp;&copy;&nbsp;Otobong&nbsp;Nkanga. Photo by&nbsp;Laura Fiorio.

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