Art metallica

Different strokes

Veteran artist El Anatsui’s lifelong experimentation with materials has not only changed the visual language of contemporary African art in many ways, but also helped position it in a global context.

Through his work and teaching, Anatsui (born Anyako, Ghana / 1944) has insisted that “artists are better off working with whatever their environment throws up.” He has also encouraged young artists to go beyond the accepted paradigm of merely combining elements of tradition with the contemporary; and synthesising the past with the present. They, in turn, have begun looking for strong if elemental qualities of ordinary and found objects, and employing them through newer and innovative interventions.

Anatsui was the youngest of his father’s 32 children. Apart from being a fisherman, his father was also an expert weaver of kente cloth, best known of all African textiles. Anatsui was still in his teens when his country gained independence. By the time he finished studying in an art school, he had already decided that the focus of his art would be on his immediate environment and indigenous material.

Curiously, Anatsui’s own discovery of a new art form came quite by chance in 1998 when he chanced upon a trash bag filled with brightly-coloured liquor bottle tops lying by a roadside. He stopped his car and collected the bag. Over a period of time, he began to see the potential afforded by the unusual material. “When I started working with the bottle caps, I thought I’d make one or two things with them, but the possibilities began to seem endless.”

Anatsui’s creations with flattened swatches of flowing colour and texture have evolved brilliantly. His large, dazzling and suspended fabric-like sculptures
with elaborate weavings of locally available/found objects often picked from street and sidewalks defy easy categorisation. While some would place them in the realm of abstract, Expressionist and Pop Art, others find elements of music and even performance in the way they are made and displayed. 

Global stardom
Anatsui’s reputation grew exponentially ever since he made his mark at the 2007 Venice Biennale. Robert Storr, the director of the Biennale, opines that Anatsui opened “a new chapter in the history of sculpture”; while art critic Holland Cotter sees the Ghanaian artist as “someone who, through a combination of brilliance, hard work and circumstance — the same factors that shape most major art careers — has become a global star and has achieved that status by working at home, finding a grand and modest beauty there, and spreading that beauty everywhere.” 

Unsurprisingly, Anatsui has become a role model to many. His works tour the world and get eagerly collected by major international museums like the British Museum; the Centre Pompidou; the Smithsonian Institution; and Guggenheim.

On his part, the artist who lives and teaches art in Nigeria, continues to be excited by artworks which incorporate elements of perpetual change; and play with the many possibilities present in ordinary material. “I am interested in creating forms which are free,” he says. “They should be able to contract as well as expand, and offer opportunities of being displayed in many ways.”

Satire of the bizarre
If objects like bottle caps provide meaning and substance to Anatsui’s art, Bangladeshi artist Tayeba Begum Lipi is attracted to other everyday material like stainless steel razor blades and safety pins!

“I always like to play with contradictions as I think our life is full of absurdity,” says Lipi, who carefully constructs objects like cradles, lady’s handbags, lovers’ beds, typewriters and even women’s underclothing with seemingly bizarre material.

Born in 1969 in Gaibanha, Bangladesh — 11th of 12 children to her parents — Lipi completed her MFA in Drawing and Painting from the Institute of Fine Art University in Dhaka in 1993. Winner of the Grand Prize at the 11th Asian Arts Biennale in 2004, she is today among the prominent figures dotting the art landscape of her country.

Lipi attracted global attention at the Venice Biennale in 2011 when her sculpture of a bra made from stainless steel razor blades was put on display and became an immediate hit. “My installation is a satire of the bizarre, consisting of 3,000 razor blades of stainless steel reshaped to that of a bra of 30 pieces, suspended from bars in a metal shelf. Here you find a sense of forebode as well as a monstrous desire/ sensuality working in tandem where the blades are not sharpened in reality, but appear to be so, threateningly reflecting in the light.”

A personal statement
Lipi says that most of her works are related to personal issues of human existence, like the pain and burden of being a woman in a male-dominated society. For instance, her 2012 work ‘Love Bed’ addressed themes of female identity as well as political and gender-specific violence. Another work titled ‘My Daughter’s Cot II’ (2012) presented a baby’s crib constructed almost entirely out of razor blades. “The ‘Cot’ is only a cold, empty space to me,” explained Lipi. “I see, and at the same time do not see, the nightmare of the bloody hours and months it took for me to make this piece.” The work was auctioned at Christie’s in March 2013 and acquired by the Guggenheim for its permanent collection.

Lipi feels that the memories of her childhood are strong and cannot be erased. “I did not come from a wealthy family. My parents really struggled to give us an education. If there was any money, they used it to buy us books, not toys or clothes.” She sees that many of her experiences are common to women in Bangladesh, “so when I make work about myself, it is also, I hope, universal.”

In 2002, Lipi co-founded the Britto Arts Trust, the country’s first artist-run non-profit organisation in Dhaka. As an alternative arts platform, the Trust encourages experimentation and development of new ideas in the visual arts. 

A selection of sculptures of Anatsui and Lipi are on display at Sakshi Gallery and Shrine Empire booths respectively at the India Art Fair, Delhi which concludes today.