El Anatsui
, Anyako, Ghana — Lives and works in Nigeria
El Anatsui grew up in the hopeful 1960s, a period typified by the profound search for social and personal identity. This search became a central theme that he's investigated throughout his life and art. He interrogates the erosion of tradition, as well as its survival and transmission into the future.
Most of Anatsui's sculptures are composed with materials that were once designated for another purpose. His early works were built from broken pottery or old wooden logs, which he cut up using a chainsaw. Over the past decade, Anatsui has focussed on large, tapestry-like metal sculptures that are delicately constructed from thousands of colourful liquor caps. He reworks and rearranges found objects, transforming materials into something new without them losing their own history. His work could be described as a collage of discarded memories. Anatsui recombines them into his own, never-fixed syntax, which the viewer is invited to adapt freely, bringing in their own history. The meaning of Anatsui's work is fluid, just like textiles and perception.
About El Anatsui
Although individually humble, the materials he uses become collectively monumental, just like our personal actions as consumers and communicators allow us to participate in a global community. Anatsui's work gently alerts us to a universal history of migration and the human histories and relationships behind the materials that surround us, interlacing object and metaphor like elements within a cloth. With his works, Anatsui attempts to refer to the hackneyed saying, "A stitch in time saves nine", which means that it is better to solve a problem promptly to save work and time in the long run. Transferred to the social cloth that we each take part of, this saying becomes a very apt prescription for the emergent condition of things at individual, national, and global levels today. If we linger and hesitate any longer before we take action, the cloth will be torn completely and it will become even harder to repair it.