The Times | EAF & 'Scottish Mission Book Depot Keta' Review

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Description

El Anatsui on his 50-year career: I've come full circle

Period19 Jul 2024

Media coverage

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Media coverage

  • TitleEl Anatsui on his 50-year career: I've come full circle
    Media name/outletThe Times
    Country/TerritoryUnited Kingdom
    Date19/07/24
    DescriptionTell us about the works on display in this exhibition

    The works include wood reliefs and metal works, as well as some prints that I
    have made over the past 50 years or so. Through them I have explored Africa's
    long histories of migration and state formation, its devastating encounters with
    European empires, the resilience of its peoples' culture and memory, as well as
    global ecological change wrought by humankind. The works speak to my commitment to sustained experimentation with my
    materials, media and technical procedures so they can speak a new artistic
    language or recast old messages in fresh ways.

    What influence does colonial rule have on your work?

    In my wood sculptures planks of different woods, placed side by side, become
    loose elements of a unit bound together by surface marks, designs and motifs
    cut with mechanical tools or burnt into them -- an extraction of the material
    beyond its immediate possibilities.
    The violence implied by the branding and tearing of the wood surfaces echoes
    the brutality of the colonial encounter -- just as the motifs and patterns, inspired
    by indigenous African designs, speak to the value and power of Africa's cultural
    heritages in imagining the continent's new futures.
    In my metal sculpture stitching is a very intensive manual work that evokes
    longstanding traditions of craftwork. It is also a remedial act, a means of
    mending broken things, or binding fragments to form a whole that is greater
    than the sum of its parts. This way of building sculptural form serves as a
    metaphor for the relationship of the individual to community. It reminds us that,
    in many African societies, the high value placed on individual subjectivity is never at the expense of the collective.

    Can you explain your links with Edinburgh and Scotland?

    My first encounter with Scotland was in the 1950s during my elementary school
    days. I remember the end-of-school-year pilgrimages to the town of Keta,
    Ghana, armed with the list of books we would need for the new class. The
    destination was the Scottish Mission Book Depot, a one-stop place to get all our
    books.

    Born towards the end of the Second World War, I learnt that contemporary
    events actually began after the First World War when Britain took over my part
    of the world from Germany. The Germans had founded churches through the
    Basel/Bremen missionaries, who were later replaced when Germany lost its
    territories. The British subsequently brought in the United Free Church of
    Scotland, represented in Ghana by the Scottish Mission. The Scottish Mission
    consolidated and built upon the gains in evangelism begun by the Germans.
    My most lasting connection, perhaps, was that the first art materials I was
    exposed to were crayons and watercolours sourced from a bookshop run by this
    Scottish Christian institution. And I cannot but regard this first exhibition of mine
    in Edinburgh, Scotland's greatest city, as having come full circle after several
    decades.

    The exhibition spans five decades. How has your work evolved in that
    time?

    I will leave that to art historians and critics to figure out. What I can say is that I
    have, as noted earlier, explored and experimented with several materials,
    beginning with found wood trays in the 1970s, to terracotta sculpture later that
    decade and after. In the early 1980s I returned to wood reliefs, using chainsaw and oxyacetylene flame as my carving tools.

    One of the earliest metal works, Woman's Cloth (2001), is included in this
    exhibition. However, the difference between Woman's Cloth, in which I tried to
    comment on gender issues through the weaving traditions of the Ghanaian
    people, and the commissioned piece Scottish Mission Book Depot Keta (2024) is
    indicative of my continuing meditation on the possibilities of the liquor bottle
    cap as a medium, whose extensive trade history in the Gulf of Guinea can be
    traced back to the colonial period, reflecting centuries of economic and cultural
    exchanges that have shaped the region.
    Producer/AuthorAshley Davies
    PersonsTessa Giblin