El Anatsui

(Ghanaian, born 1944)

Migration

Footnotes

Provenance
Collection of Seth Dei, Accra;
Bonhams, London, 4 October 2018, lot 26;
A private collection (acquired from the above sale).

Exhibited
Paris, KADIST, Diaspora at Home, 15 October 2021 - 30 January 2022.

Migration (1992) is a superb example of El Anatsui's wood-relief wall hangings. Comprised of eight vertical slats of wood which have been marked through processes of cutting and burning, the work belongs to his Migration series. Created in 1992, this body of work explores the historic and ongoing global movement of people and commodities. The series engages with subjects including the transatlantic slave trade, the reciprocal forced removal of populations from Ghana and Nigeria, and the mass migration of African individuals to the West in the mid-twentieth and twenty first centuries.

The theme of migration is evidenced in the present work through the very act of its creation. El Anatsui uses a chainsaw and an oxyacetylene torch to create his wooden sculptures. Early in his practice, the chainsaw was employed solely as a tool to prepare blocks of wood for carving in the studio. However, during the several months in 1980 that he spent at the Community of Arts, Cummington in Massachusetts, El Anatsui discovered that the power tool might be used to cut rough designs into wood which could then be smoothed and blackened using the torch. Metaphoric meaning was assigned to these new techniques: the chainsaw cuts through the wood just as colonising European countries carved up the African continent in the nineteenth century. In turn, the scorched surfaces and jagged edges of the work caused by the cutting and burning actions of the power tools echo the violence enacted by these colonial agents.

Countering the devastation of these destructive forces, El Anatsui incorporates different coloured woods in Migration to celebrate the diverse cultures and ethnicities of the African continent. The patterns inscribed and burnt onto the wooden slats borrow from a diverse range of mark-making traditions in Africa. These designs extend across the breaks between the individual slats of wood, symbolising the movement of populations across borders.

Reflecting on his sculptural practice in 2007, the artist explained 'it's not about aesthetics only. The work is about making a statement beyond what the eyes can see, it has something to give to the mind as well' (El Anatsui quoted in Vogel, 2012: p. 83). In Migration, process and aesthetics are united in the artist's exploration of mobilised populations. The work was recently included in the acclaimed exhibition Diaspora at Home at KADIST in Paris from 15th October 2021 to 30th January 2022.

Bibliography
Susan Mullin Vogel, El Anatsui: art and life (Munich, 2012).