El Anatsui : "Out of West Africa" (2006)
artdesigncafé | café library | Published 15 September 2009
This interview was previously published in Sculpture magazine, 25(6), July/August, pp. 34-9; and also in G. Harper & T. Moyer’s Conversations on Sculpture (2007), pp. 312-17. (International Sculpture Center Press: Hamilton, NJ, USA; distributed by University of Washington Press).
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El Anatsui. Earth cloth, (2003). Aluminum bottle tops and copper wire, 487.7 x 457.2 cm.
A “cloth” made by sewing thousands of recycled, crushed, and flattened liquor bottle tops. A 10-foot-tall installation of redundant newspaper printing plates used for obituary pages and re-used as sculptural material to comment on temporary—and disposable—human lives. And rough, chain-sawed wood forming a line, an abstracted Visa queue, depicting hopes, dreams, desperation, and global inequality. These are just three works spanning five decades of artistic production by El Anatsui, who is widely regarded as one of the foremost African artists of his generation. His work refers to the history of the African continent, drawing on traditional African idioms as well as Western art practices.
Born and raised in Ghana, West Africa, El Anatsui studied sculpture at the College of Art, University of Science and Technology, in Kumasi, central Ghana. Since 1996, he has been a professor of sculpture at the University of Nigeria at Nsukka in the southeastern part of the country. He originally joined the university’s Fine and Applied Arts Department as a lecturer back in 1975.
Over the years, El Anatsui has exhibited extensively around the globe. His work has been shown at the Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art (2002); the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, DC (2001); the Centro de Cultura Contemporania Barcelona (2001); the 8th Osaka Sculpture Triennale (1995); and the Venice Biennale (1990). Most recently he participated in “Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent,” which featured more than 70 artists from Algeria to Zimbabwe, as well as African artists living in Europe and North America. This exhibition was on view at the Hayward Gallery during El Anatsui’s concurrent solo exhibition at the October Gallery, also in London.
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El Anatsui. Visa queue, (1992). Tropical hardwoods, 20 cm. high, length and width variable.
R.J. Preece: When I was in Barcelona reviewing the “Africas” exhibition (2001), I was particularly captured by your piece Visa queue. For me, it’s one of those artworks that stays in your life—it provided an emotive, artistic representation of West African emigration to Europe, as resonant as the documentaries we see of people walking across the Sahara and risking their lives to cross the Strait from Morocco to Spain and into the EU. You created a lyrical line of massed figures, a nondescript mass. Why did you choose such a small scale for this work? Why did you want the viewer to be so uncomfortably monumental in comparison?
El Anatsui: Scale here takes on an inflective dimension—a dimension of significance. A friend related to me what his father-in-law told him when he went to inform him that he was migrating to a “greener pasture”: “The lazy man says his own home is not good enough.” Migration, especially for economic reasons, produces these desperate situations in which people are ready to be subjected to all forms of dehumanization. Situations that not only process them into a roughly hewn homogenous mass, but also miniaturize their stature. The figures, in assorted natural wood colors, are faceless, more like statistical data bound together by a dark gloomy fate. I have experienced real visa queues in the ’80s and ’90s in Lagos, Nigeria, which were awfully long, where people were goaded along with paddocks and along barricaded paths. But Visa queue is about any situation in which people are constrained by circumstances to compete in long queues—and this happens everywhere in the world. Everybody is reduced to the same height and scale, and at times identification by assigned numbers suggests the idea of statistics. [1]
El Anatsui interview, page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5
References:
[1] Click to see an extensive quotation of the Q&A featured by artistic director Robert Storr in the Venice Biennial 2007 catalogue.
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