The Paradox of Plenty

View of the exhibition “To Dig a Hole That Collapses Again,” 2018, showing Carved to Flow, 2017–18, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.
In March of 2020, when I first began to write about Nigeria-born, Belgium-based artist Otobong Nkanga (b. 1974), I was sitting in my apartment in Windhoek, Namibia, thinking about Namibia’s history—both against the backdrop of the global pandemic and in relation to Nkanga’s work. “To Dig a Hole That Collapses Agai