El AnatsuiNational Identity Card, 2021
El Anatsui’s wooden sculptures form a pivotal part of his practice and conceptual thinking. Working with indigenous hardwoods sourced in Ghana and Nigeria, he employed carving, burning, painting, and staining to transform the surface of the wood. These treatments created layered textures and rich tonal variations, revealing a deep sensitivity to material and form. Many of the works are modular in structure, composed of panels that can be rearranged, introducing a sense of mutability and open-endedness that would later become central to his practice.
Through works such as ‘National Identity Card’, El Anatsui subtly gestures at the different things that make up and break apart an identity – fingerprints, a connection to heritage and folkloric traditions as well as more contemporary tools of identification such as DNA recognition. By embracing one’s identity with and without its limits, Anatsui reflects his principle of thinking about life as “a beautiful phenomenon to be experienced and not a problem to be solved.”
