El Anatsui

Spanning five decades, Scottish Mission Book Depot Keta at Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, is the most significant exploration of the practice of the Ghanaian artist El Anatsui (b.1944) FIG.1 held in the United Kingdom to date. The exhibition brings together the artist’s early works alongside his now signature large-scale sculptural wall hangings, a monumental example of which is installed on the façade of the gallery in the university’s Old College quadrangle FIG.2. It shares its title with a new 13 metre-wide work made specifically for the gallery FIG.3, which recalls the Scottish Mission book depot in Keta that provided the artist’s books and art materials as a child. 

Now in his eighties, Anatsui came of age during a critical transitional period in the history of modern Ghana, and of West Africa more generally. The advance of decolonial independence, the rise of such intellectual movements as Négritude and Ghana’s emergence as a centre of contemporary art are only a few of the developments that Anatsui has witnessed during his career. His works are as much records of this history as they are expressions of his formal and aesthetic concerns.

Anatsui has a deep and abiding interest in West African history, particularly the ways in which creative practice has informed the cultures that grew along the West coast before and after the depredations of colonialism. In October he will unveil a major site-specific commission at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which expands on his reconfiguration and reimagination of locally sourced materials. This interview, which took place in Edinburgh following the opening of Scottish Mission Book Depot Keta during Edinburgh Art Festival, offers a glimpse into the artist’s depth of knowledge and the scope of his work, which remains as diverse as his influences.

William Kherbek: Could you talk about the process behind preparing your show at Talbot Rice Gallery? How did you conceptualise it?

El Anatsui: It’s an exhibition of my works already in Britain, rather than a fully comprehensive one. The selection has mostly been made by Talbot Rice, and they have tried to cover the range of my practice as much as possible FIG.4 FIG.5, starting with wooden relief works from the early 1990s FIG.6 FIG.7. The only thing that hasn’t been included is the Broken Pots series.

There’s also a new work in the show, Scottish Mission Book Depot Keta FIG.8. It harks back to my childhood days, which I spent in the Presbyterian church mission house in Ghana. We would go and buy books from the Scottish Mission book depot in Keta, which was about 30 minutes away from where I lived. So, when I was invited for this exhibition in Edinburgh, it felt like coming full circle. After the First World War, the Scottish Mission was bought into Ghana – the Gold Coast then – by the United Kingdom, to take over institutions and churches established by the Germans and Swiss. They oversaw Presbyterian churches in Ghana, and some other parts of Africa as well. That’s how I was introduced to Scotland.

WK: One of the elements that’s always been of interest to me is your work’s relation to light: the use of reflective surfaces, the way that some of the materials engage with light in spaces, for example. I was wondering how this evolved. Was it something that emerged from using the materials themselves, as many of the commercial ones you found had these ‘shiny’ properties, such as the aluminium bottle tops FIG.9, or was making works that were ‘internally illuminated’ part of your aim from the start?

EA: With the bottle caps, initially it wasn’t what’s on the coloured side, but the metal side. That’s what I focused on. But what I discovered was whether it’s the colour or metal side, all of them come with a shine, which is something intrinsic to the material – metal that refers to the colonial name of my country, the Gold Coast. 

The scale was something that started small. One of the earliest metal works that I made was Woman’s Cloth FIG.10. You can compare it to the sizes that I’ve been able to draw out from the same material over the course of time. The largest was the Turbine Hall commission at Tate Modern, London, in 2023–24.

WK: I’m interested in hearing your thoughts on the compositional element of your works. As many of them are hung against walls FIG.11, I wonder how you view the relationship between sculptural composition and painterly composition. Is it something you’re working against or something you’re embracing?

EA: What I do is to not bother about these classifications – sculpture, painting – but instead conflate all of them and work with them. Although, having said that, initially my thinking and operation was that of a sculptor – a sculptor working with form that was very free and loose, to the point that I could do anything with the initial idea. It was later on that I started paying attention to colour. Because I saw that the bottle caps came in many colours – yellows, blacks, reds – I got to think also like a painter. When I made the first piece, it hung in the middle of the studio, it wasn’t on the wall, to emphasise the fact that I was thinking like a sculptor. In sculpture you think about the three-dimensional, and something that can be experienced in 360 degrees.

All these bodies of work involve time as well. Time in the sense that a free form doesn’t replicate itself – for example, the creases that are created in the work won’t be seen in any other iteration. If you meet the work again you’ll see something different. The element of time, colour and form are all embedded in each work.

WK: And of course, the labour of salvaging the materials.

EA: So many things. The labels of the bottles all have a narrative. You can learn about the sociology, commerce and politics that have facilitated them. These aren’t from imported drinks, they’re local and the distillers have their own brands, like Black Gold, First Lady or Ecomog. When the second Liberian Crisis (1999–2003) began, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) deployed the Economic Community of Monitoring Group (ECOMOG) to intervene, and so a drinks producer named their brand Ecomog. Each drink provides some political history and reveals approximately what was happening in the social environment when the drink was produced.

WK: Could you speak about the way your relationship with scale has evolved over the course of your career? The sheer weight of the consumption implicit in these works is inescapable. There’s an infinity, but also a futility, inscribed in them – they could be seen as a bleak commentary or a kind of satire. Do you feel closer to either one of those interpretations?

EA: The scale has evolved naturally through understanding the material. You can see from the exhibition that as I continued working with the material, I was able to fine-tune the process, and was able to get it more structurally compact, allowing me to expand more and more. Since these caps are sourced from locally made drinks, we get our supplies from the local distillers. They have people who collect used bottles for re-use, from which they discard the caps and we’re the beneficiaries of this process. It’s not only us, there are other people who use them too – they cast household goods, such as aluminium pots and other utensils. We collect from the suppliers once a year, every December. This enables us to assess if there’s an increase or decrease of drinking in the community. Statistics inadvertently became part of the practice.

WK: Could you talk about the ideas behind the commission for the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern?

EA: It was actually the third idea I had for that project. When I received the invitation, I immediately thought about planting sugar cane, to allude to the connection between plantations and Tate & Lyle. Although they didn’t take part directly in the slave trade, they were beneficiaries of the infrastructures that the slave trade had set up.

Growing up in the Gold Coast, the only available sugar was from Tate & Lyle, so this was my first thought. But I was told that an artist had explored the idea of planting in the Tate Turbine Hall already. I thought about the transatlantic slave trade and how it created Tate & Lyle, Barclays – all of these big institutions that were the beneficiaries of it.

I was reminded of learning as a child about the thirty or forty castles built by Europeans on the coast of Ghana. They were used for the slave trade, as they would assemble the slaves and ship them from these castles. When I visited the most famous and biggest one at Cape Coast, I was struck by what I’d call a classic illustration of the idea of ‘heaven’ and ‘hell’. There’s an underground dungeon where the slaves were kept and there’s a building directly on top of it, which was used as a church: heaven and hell. I wanted to replicate that at Tate – exactly the same size – but even the Turbine Hall couldn’t take that scale. We spent quite some time thinking about and permuting the structure, but it just wasn’t going to be effective.

I had to forget about that idea too. Instead, I thought about bottle caps and how they have a lot to say about the transatlantic slave trade. When I visited the Turbine Hall again, as I walked down the ramp, I was reminded of the descent into a dungeon. I thought the space looked like a ship and, since I work with large sheets of bottle caps, the connection to the sail emerged and then other ideas followed. The work connects elements from the transatlantic slave trade, the ships sails, the sea and the world.

WK: How does the use of quotidian, explicitly commercial, materials relate to your thoughts about how fine art is consumed or circulated?

EA: A good example would be the wooden tray, the first object that I worked with at the beginning of my career. The wooden trays are used in the market to display produce for sale. The first time I exhibited works that utilised these trays, there was an immediate rapport because people would see them every day in the markets and then they saw them as works of art on the wall. They could relate to them very easily, and so they connected with the works. Also, for the first time, regular people, not just the affluent, were able to collect because the materials were from everyday life, and therefore more accessible. The trays are featured in the exhibition at Talbot Rice Gallery, along with the print works shown upstairs, because just like the trays, prints and multiples are more accessible than one-offs. I’ve always regarded printmaking as the most democratic form of art. Multiples can get to more people, in the sense that the work is able to expand the demographics of the collector or consumer, just as the trays did.

WK: The local response was immediate?

EA: Yes, they embraced it. If I’d used media like plaster of Paris, as I did when I was at art school, there would’ve been a distance between the work and the audience. It was like going back to the beginnings of art, when artists drew on cave walls with the materials they had at hand. Art, I believe, is closer to the audience when it’s sourced from the local environment and immediate circumstances.

WK: Europe has an intrinsically problematic relationship to African art and artists. Often art from Africa is placed in a dismissive or patronising position – described as ‘tribal’, ‘traditional’ or ‘folk’ art, which is excluded from the supposedly sophisticated discourse surrounding ‘high art’ in Europe.

African modernism, for example, is often seen as explicitly rejecting tradition or disparaged as part of Cold War initiatives like the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). I wonder what you make of the relationship of your work to the European discourses of contemporary art and art history. Do you find any of these frames of reference helpful in thinking about your ideas, or are they just more of the characteristic reductive approach to African art in Europe?

EA: I think that the relationship between African art and Europe is something Europe should concern itself with. Terms like tribal art or folk art – these hierarchies are not something particular to Africa, as far as I know. Art is a product of the imagination, and that’s always been universal. The notion of inserting hierarchies exists in all places that have been colonised: the tendency to look down on people, call them ‘subjects’ and consider anything they do as inferior. There’s no measure for a phenomenon as complex as imagination, which can leap over borders and boundaries, visible or invisible, literal or conceptual. When commodification comes into play, the mechanisms of marketing and demarketing are set in motion.

As a good example, with the presence of the colonialists, locally produced high-quality alcoholic drinks were outlawed,  prohibited, and characterised as ‘illicit’. They were replaced by drinks brought in by the Imperialists. They had to play down what the local people made, in favour of their own product. This same model has been applied to other modes of culture. There’s no ‘centre’ or ‘periphery’ now; there are many centres. There are as many centres in the world as there are cultures. Within as well as across these, art happens. 

WK: The ‘many centres’ is certainly at play in the way contemporary art discourse is always looking for the ‘next’ thing: the next artist, the next Berlin, the next movement, the next hotspot, and so on.

EA: Commodification brings about the idea of being ‘in fashion’ or being ‘of the moment’. Whereas if you look at the history of art, you’ll see that it’s not about the fashionable. It might be cyclical, but it’s not about fashion. It’s kind of cumulative – whatever was done in the past didn’t come and go, it’s still with us, and people still work in those modes. We invent and add to things.

There’s also this idea of labelling as part of the process of commodification. To sell art, you need to categorise it: ‘conceptual’ or ‘minimalist’, and so on. In art school we learned about European artists, modern art, Impressionism, Expressionism...

In Europe, art is presented in a way that follows a linear path: Impressionism, followed by Expressionism; one movement must replace the other. It’s similar to the model used by the colonialists to replace local products with imports, which also created a hierarchy.

Meanwhile, when I looked at art from Africa, I noticed that different regions were creating works in styles similar to these movements. However, they were happening at the same time. These styles exist simultaneously across different spaces. There’s no strict chronological order; it has more to do with spatiality and context, it’s circular and cumulative. This observation led me to question the need for naming and categorising art just to validate it. I don’t believe in that approach.

WK: The idea of giving ‘art’ or artistic movements a name seems to cut against the notion of a living, vital practice.

EA: I read a biography of Sundiata Keita, the founder of the ancient Mali Empire, and something in one of the pages struck me. I reread it and saw what I’d describe as a work of art. He lived in the early thirteenth century, was born into a royal family and was picked by an oracle to succeed his father as the king. When his father died, one his siblings usurped the throne. Sundiata and his mother were forced into exile and eventually hosted by another king in a town far away. While in exile there, Sundiata led his forces from victory to victory. As the hosting king didn’t have a male heir, he offered to leave Sundiata the kingdom in his will.

Sundiata’s half-brother, who had taken over, was a weak ruler and as a result the kingdom was under constant attack. So, people in the kingdom began searching for Sundiata, who was predicted to be their rightful king. After a long search, they found Sundiata and told him of their plight. He agreed to leave with them to try and help. His host king wasn’t very happy to lose him, but there was nothing he could do. On the eve of his departure, Sundiata’s mother died, and he decided he must bury her before leaving. He asked the hosting king for land to bury his mother, but the king told Sundiata that since he wasn’t interested in inheriting his kingdom, he’d have to pay for the land.

Sundiata left in anger and returned hours later with a basket filled with bits of pottery, on top of which were guineafowl feathers and wisps of straw. He put the basket before the king and said, ‘Very well king, here is the price of the land’. The king became even angrier and cried ‘Sundiata, take this rubbish away. That isn’t the price of the land!’. After Sundiata left, one of the king’s advisers from Saudi Arabia said that he saw the great significance in what had been placed before him. The advisor deconstructed the meaning of Sundiata’s action and went on to explain that it means Sundiata will in turn wage war on the kingdom: the broken pots and wisps of straw will be the only recognisable fragments left of the town; there will be such ruin that guineafowl will come to take their dust baths there. After hearing this, the king understood. He not only gave Sundiata land, but also use of the calvary to rescue his people. Their victory and subsequent ones marked the beginning of the Mali Empire. I regard this work from the episode, which took place around 1230, as the first recorded work of what we now refer to as conceptual art.

WK: And the first misunderstanding of conceptual art…

EA: Growing up, I saw several similar modes of expression. There’s every reason to believe that it’s not particular to Sundiata and any culture, it’s in all cultures – that people can express themselves without words, but by recontextualising things. Characterisations are too confining. As an artist, I should have the freedom to work outside of these and not to be restricted by whether it fits within a trend. I should be able to set my own trend, and recast a new form.