Baggage 1972.2007/08, A happening by Allan Kaprow re-invented by Otobong Nkanga.

Baggage (1972 – 2007/08) A happening by Allan Kaprow, re-invented by Otobong Nkanga
Kunsthalle Bern, Monday, 11th August 2008, 7 pm.

It lies in the nature of the time- and performance-related work of American artist Allan Kaprow that in principle a repetition of a happening, or an ‘activity’ as he called his work later on, is not possible – and also not wished by the artist. Nevertheless, Kaprow himself re-enacted a larger number of pieces on several occasions. In Dortmund in the eighties he made the first’re-inventions' and he talked about his exhibition as "A fantasy of Allan Kaprow for the moment". His travelling exhibition in North America in the late eighties (The Carter University for Contemporary Art, University of Texas in Arlington) provided the framework for re-inventing happenings – often with surprisingly changed ingredients and outcome. According to Kaprow activities and happenings don’t grow old over the years; it is not nostalgic to repeat works but rather a challenge to adapt them to the moment, to the issues, the themes, maybe even the fashion of today. As long as the 'central metaphor', as he called it, was maintained, there was no problem. By this the works stay contemporary, comparable to the transmissions of content in oral history.

Baggage was one of more scores for happenings written by Allan Kaprow that evoked the aspect of displacement of goods from one place to another, next to a.o. Drag, Transfer, Moving, Round Trip, The Perfect Bed, Trading Dirt, and last but not least Refills (1967-68). For Refills, which knows a resonance in Baggage, bulldozers had to excavate in six different places in the US, a trench six feet deep, seven wide and a quarter mile long. The earth from the excavated trenches then was transported by freight trains. The trenches were refilled and their surfaces levelled by hand. In his score, Kaprow mentions the differences in earth colour across the country, which would probably appear in strong contrast to the surroundings when the trenches were refilled.

In Kaprow's score for Baggage this reference to the landscape disappeared.
However, in conversation with Otobong Nkanga it became clear that when she would’re-invent' Baggage, the return of the (art-historical) notion of ‘landscape’ would take up an importance hardly implicit in the original version of Allan Kaprow. By taking Dutch sand to the dramatically changing landscape of the oil rich country, Nigeria, she puts a strong emphasis on the notion of displacement between both continents to Baggage.
By taking packaged sand to Lagos and sending back to The Netherlands sand from there, Otobong Nkanga “re-politicizes” Allan Kaprows original. Although it is self-evident that between 1972 and today the context of air travelling for people and the transport of goods changed dramatically, the artist - of Nigerian background and working in Europe - didn’t want to delve directly or too explicitly in the obvious political issues raised when displacing commodities today. She rather wanted to render a changing landscape around which a discursive horizon of these identifiable stakes becomes activated, hardly visible in the world today where products are transported from one continent to another and where the origins of products (raw materials) have gone through different transformations.

The artist explained she thinks this work could be a metaphor of a situation wherein we can look upon ‘displacement’ quite broadly, to refer not only to the movement of goods, but also to human displacement, and accompanying activities and ideas around the world.

Philippe Pirotte

Otobong Nkanga was born in Kano, Nigeria. She lives and works in Paris and Antwerp. Performer and visual Artist, She works in a broad spectrum of media, including performance, installations, photography, drawings and sculpture. According to Nkanga, the various media she employs “interrogate our mental and physical identities in varied environments and contexts.” Thus, drawing inspiration from her surroundings, the artist creates works that can be placed in disparate environments and are often fragments of a multimedia work in progress.

Nkanga began her art studies at the Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile- Ife, Nigeria, and later continued them in Paris at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Rijksakademievan beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam and she recently finished her Masters program at Dasarts, Amsterdam. She has exhibited widely internationally. Recent shows include: Flow, Studio Museum Harlem, New York; Africa remix, Toured Paris, Düsseldorf, Tokyo, Johannesburg and Stockholm; Snap judgments: New Positions in African Contemporary Photography, toured New York, Miami, Mexico, Canada and the Netherlands; and over the course of the last five years, she participated in the Sharjah, Taipei, Dakar, São Paulo and Havanna Biennials

We would like to thank the Allan Kaprow Estate, Hauser&Wirth, Zürich/London

This project is conducted in collaboration with De Appel Centre for the Arts in Amsterdam and Benefits from the support of Dasarts Amsterdam and the Mondriaan Foundation. The program of Activities and events at the Kunsthalle Bern is promoted by the Cultural Prize of the Burgergemeinde Bern