El AnatsuiScottish Mission Book Depot, 2024
El Anatsui, one of Africa’s most celebrated contemporary artists, is renowned for his monumental sculptural hangings composed of thousands of aluminium bottle tops reclaimed from Ghanaian and Nigerian liquor and printing-press industries. These shimmering, tapestry-like works speak to the complexity of piecing together fragmented cultural, national, and ethnic identities in the aftermath of colonialism. Drawing on the weaving traditions of his Ewe heritage—his father was both a fisherman and master weaver of Kente cloth—they also reflect the vulnerability of our natural world. Suspended between painting and sculpture, each work is shape-shifting and installed anew each time, embodying Anatsui’s belief in artworks as living, responsive forms that evolve with their context and custodians.
Born in Ghana in 1944 during British colonial rule, Anatsui has long engaged with the legacies of empire across Africa. ‘Scottish Mission Book Depot’, a 13-metre-wide commission for the Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh, draws on personal memory and historical entanglement, recalling the Scottish Mission Book Depot in Keta where he received his first books and crayons. Rendered in earth-rich yellows with flecks of blue and red, the work evokes a child’s early attempts at expression like tentative marks on paper, a search for voice. Rising like ochre clay from the ground, its surface bears the traces of a creative self in formation.
Originally presented at Talbot Rice Gallery in 2024, within the context of the volcanic surrounds of Edinburgh, the work was steeped in the memory of Scotland’s role in the colonial project. Through its mutable surface and elemental presence, Anatsui offers a meditation on transformation, resilience, and the tangled relationships between past and future, place and identity.
