Unity as Strenght – El Anatsui in conversation

Hans-Ulrich Obrist: For your Safety Curtain project, you have returned to the round trays common to Ghanaian markets that appeared in your earliest work, after completing art school. Why did you start using them in the first place?

El Anatsui: After the British curriculum of the Kumasi art school. I wanted to be nourished by things from my own culture and environment. I chanced upon the trays as my starting point and combined them with Adinkra symbols, burned into the surface. Having moved back to Ghana from Nigeria in recent years. I am revisiting the trays. The Adinkra symbols led me to work in the abstract mode for most of my life, but now I’m trying to utilize the trays to understand the human form.

HUO: You combine the trays with other wooden elements.

EA: Yes, around my studio in Tema there are discarded wooden pallets everywhere. And like the market trays, they’re connected with trade, imports and exports.

HUO: In combining these two elements, you also bring in the shape of Akua’ba fertility dolls. Hundreds of them are looking at us in the opera house. In a way, it’s an audience facing an audience.

EA: In real life, the Akua’ba dolls are carried on the backs of the human users; here the dolls confront the audience for the first time. Fertility and music are both creative acts. The open market in Africa is a veritable theatre but with free and uncontrolled sound levels. In the theatre you can have dead quiet or loud noise. So, it’s bringing two cultures together, the unregulated culture of the market and the controlled culture of
the theatre, to see what happens.

HUO: Gilles Deleuze wrote about repetition and difference, and it seems to me that this is very relevant for your work.

EA: I create variety through repetition. The bottle caps, the trays and the pallet timbers are all repeating shapes and elements, like the different sections of an orchestra. I see myself as the conductor, deciding when each section of the orchestra comes in, creating art that is not monotonous to the spirit but that has the right elements to create diversity.

HUO: Memory is also an important aspect of your work.

EA: Memory is very much present in the market trays and the wooden pallets. Everything I use in my art carries the memory of human touch. For example, the smell of fish once presented on the trays adds power to the work. That’s why working with these traditional trays is interesting to me, because they come with so much history accumulated over the years. This gives the works many words to talk with.

HUO: But at the same time, you have stated that you want openness of interpretation, that the work can lead us anywhere.

EA: Yes, the work should be free to lead us in different directions because as humans, we all have accumulated different kinds of experiences and memories and histories.

HUO: Your Safety Curtain becomes an important element of the architecture of this Vienna Opera.

EA: The curtain is like a wall. I’ve talked about walls on many occasions as uniting as well as separating. The curtain both separates and links the audience with the performance. The Vienna Opera is associated with some of the world’s most iconic musicians, from Mozart and Strauss onward, so my project will connect this European culture with African culture.

HUO: You once said that "What cloth is to Africans, the monument is to Westerners" – and the Safety Curtain is a form of cloth.

EA: This quote is from the artist Sonya Clark. In Africa, textile is the storehouse of memory of events, people and many other important things.

HUO: The curtain also underscores your move from freestanding sculptural objects to more expansive installations on wall and floor. Okwui Enwezor described this move as »triumphant scale«.

EA: Well, how did triumphant scale come into my work? A single tray is not triumphant, so I would show them in clusters of up to ten. That is already far bigger than a standard canvas. And so came the idea of working with numbers, especially when working with strips of wood and bottle caps. Because of their small size, I must link them to achieve some visual effectiveness. That’s how I came to work with numbers and the irregular, clustered form. And so, this idea of triumphant scale evolved from my working process because of the numbers of elements that
I must handle and bring together to express unity through strength.

HUO: In our very polarised world, this idea of unity as strength is also political.

EA: Yes, it is political, but it applies not only to humans but to all life situations. Ants come together to lift things many times their weight and bush dogs in packs can take on lions!