El Anatsui: Scottish Mission Book Depot Keta

In the summer of 2024, Tessa Giblin curated a major exhibition of Ghanaian artist El Anatsui. The most significant exploration of El Anatsui’s practice ever staged in the UK, Scottish Mission Book Depot Keta spanned five decades of work and extended to the building’s façade, turning it into an open-air gallery that summer.

The exhibition opened with a monumental new work made specifically for Talbot Rice Gallery. It journeyed through a large selection of Anatsui’s iconic large-scale sculptural wall hangings, made with reclaimed metal from the bottling industry in Ghana and Nigeria (created between 2002 and 2024). This included the ‘grandmother’ of these forms, Woman’s Cloth (2002), the first of its kind, on loan from the British Museum, and a sleeping chamber in which visitors could quietly observe Royal Slumber (2023).

The exhibition also included a selection of carved wooden reliefs from over a 30-year period, as well as printed works on paper that told the story and carried the imprint of his decades-long, intricate production of the monumental metal bottle-top artworks, most recently seen in an extraordinary commission for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. Culminating in a huge outdoor installation, TSIATSIA—Searching for Connection (2013) welcomed visitors and communities into the heart of the University—the grass Quad of the Old College, reframed as a gallery—where connections were sought and made throughout the Scottish summer.

One of Africa’s most prominent artists, many of El Anatsui’s artworks are created through the stitching together of thousands of aluminium bottle tops, reclaimed from Ghanaian and Nigerian liquor bottling (and increasingly printing-press) industries. The pictorial compositions reflected the complexity of stitching together cultural, national, and ethnic ideas of belonging in the aftermath of colonialism in Africa. They carried the weaving traditions of Anatsui’s own heritage (his father had been both a fisherman and a master weaver of Kente cloth) and expressed the vulnerability of our natural world. Slipping mercurially between painting and sculpture, the artworks were shape-shifting forms, installed differently every time they were shown. Giving them a life and evolution that reflected Anatsui’s active understanding of his artworks as living objects, they became carriers of meaning: listening and evolving, reacting to whoever had them in their custody. Rippling with intensity, his unification of thousands of fragments of metal to create a metamorphic whole became fundamental to our understanding of the sculptural object and its ability to evolve.

Anatsui was born in Ghana in 1944 during the British colonial period, and his work engages critically with the impact of colonialism in post-independence Ghana and across Africa. In making an extraordinary new 13-metre-wide artwork within the volcanic surrounds of Edinburgh, he recalled the Scottish Mission Book Depot in Keta that had provided his books and crayons as a child. The dynamic, earth-like tapestry of a variety of yellows was smattered with spots and scribbles in blue and red, reminding us of the child who had sought to articulate himself on paper and had looked for the means with which to do it. Rising like rich, yellow clay from the ground, carrying the marks of a nascent creative voice engraved in its surface, Anatsui’s newest artwork arrived in Edinburgh with the indelible memory of Scotland’s role in the colonial project. It was with these tangled histories and complex futures that El Anatsui unveiled his work in Scotland—full of political, postcolonial, and social histories.