OSLO – Senga Nengudi: Sand and Water

For more than five decades, Senga Nengudi has developed a distinctive practice that moves across sculpture, performance, dance, and poetry, connecting humble everyday materials with philosophical and spiritual ideas. Her works are at once abstract, anthropomorphic, and deeply sensuous. Pointing to social and political conditions without ever becoming illustrative, they instead insist on the spontaneous and existential encounter between artwork and viewer, grounded in a profound engagement with other people and their potential.

Senga Nengudi is a central figure in recent American art history. In recent years, her works have been the subject of several major exhibitions across Europe and South America. Sand and Water is Nengudi’s first solo exhibition in Denmark and the Nordic region and has been developed in close collaboration with the artist.

At the centre of the exhibition is a new site-specific installation conceived especially for Den Frie’s lower-level gallery OSLO, composed of sand, metal, glass, rubber, textiles, pigment, sound, and found objects. The work unfolds as a fragmented landscape or a ritual, pulsating scene. The juxtaposition of elements drawn from widely different contexts relates thematically to memory, loss, industrialism, craft, labour, and nature. As a whole, the installation evokes the sense of a world in dissolution, while simultaneously suggesting a world in the process of emerging anew.