says, ‘and not look for anything else, because if you
find materials from around you, you will do work
that relates to your location and circumstances.’
He has held on to these foundational principles
and experimented with wooden mortars, broken
ceramics, cassava graters, printing plates and milk
tins; creating work with fluid forms, reminiscent
of textiles, upsetting categories of sculpture, exploring
the reuse and transformation of materials, proving
how these materials are at once local and specific and
yet transcend place. ‘My work has freedom as its
watchword, the idea of freedom being able to shape
itself or get shaped in different ways. Each time it
is an opportunity to do something new. This has been
my principle leading up to the bottle cap series.’
Of all his mediums, it’s the use of liquor bottle
caps (a reminder that alcohol was an item of barter in
colonial trade across Africa) that made him a global
art star. Anatsui had been exhibiting consistently since
1969 and in Europe and the States since the mid-1990s.
But he became an ‘overnight success’ at the 2007
Venice Biennale, where he draped Fresh and Fading
Memories, a monumental tapestry made of liquor bottle
caps and copper wire, over the 15th century Gothic
façade of the Palazzo Fortuny. ‘It was a bit of surprise.
I went from struggling and trying to get things to
move and then, all of a sudden, they just pick up and
you’re like, what is happening?’
His Doha exhibition surveys his five-decade career,
including the bottle top sculptures, ceramic sculptures
from the 1970s, wood sculptures and wall reliefs from
the 1980s and 1990s; and lesser known drawings, prints
and sketchbooks. ‘The term “Triumphant Scale”
encompasses not only materiality, but also the journey,
and the journey of artists like him from what used to
be called the margins to what is now the mainstream,’
Okeke-Agulu explains. ‘Anatsui is an artist working in
a place called Nsukka that very few people can identify
on a map, and whose work has inevitably compelled
art world types to know where Nsukka is.’
Anatsui arrived in Nsukka in the mid-1970s to
teach at the Fine and Applied Arts department of
UNN (he remained there until 2011). He often went to
surrounding villages around Nsukka to be inspired by
the sculptural expressions of its people. It was in one of
these mountainside villages, in 1998, that he discovered
liquor bottle caps by accident – in a trash heap.
He took them to his studio. Eight months later, it
occurred to him to explore them as a medium. ‘People
are constantly shaping things, arranging things and
installing things without calling them art. But with
one’s experience, one knows it’s an idea that can be
developed into art,’ says Anatsui.
Nsukka has been the well spring of Anatsui’s
productivity in other ways and the foundation
of his artistic legacy. In 2001, he gathered a number
of artists, his former students – also working in »
ANATSUI WITH ASSISTANTS
AND A WORK IN PROGRESS
AT HIS STUDIO, DESIGNED
BY THE LAGOS-BASED
PRACTICE JAMES CUBITT
ARCHITECTS IN 2015
Art Icon