A few days ago the Board of Directors of the Biennale di Venezia chaired by Paolo Baratta, appointed - upon recommendation by this year's Artistic Director Okwui Enwezor - artist El Anatsui Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 56th International Art Exhibition, and curator Susanne Ghez Winner of the Special Golden Lion for Services to the Arts.
El Anatsui's Golden Lion is extremely well deserved: considered as today's foremost contemporary African sculptor, the Ghanaian artist - born in Anyako in 1944 but working in Nigeria - is known for his memerising works, densely intricate sculptures (mentioned in a previous post) made with found materials such as discarded aluminum caps and plastic seals from liquor bottles, which he flattens, shapes, perforates, and painstakingly assembles with copper wire.
The final result looks a bit like a modern tapestry or a flexible metallic textile (a sort of recycled and monumental version of Versace's oroton...) characterised by visually striking colour schemes including gold, red, and yellow.
El Anatsui's work derives from traditional strip-woven Kente cloth developed by Akan and Ewe weavers in the artist's native Ghana. These textiles are usually employed for commemorative purposes and at times they are draped on the body as the apparel of chiefs and regional leaders, but El Anatsui also borrows his draped motifs from Classical sculptures.
This main inspiration is combined in his work with techniques and moods borrowed from Western art including mosaics, tapestry, chain-mail armours and the paintings of Gustav Klimt. El Anatsui's works also offer comment on contemporary life and on issues such as consumption of alcohol, the impact of liquor on Nigerian villages, and the detritus of consumerism.
The prestigious award could also be seen as a call for more African artists to take part in the Venice Biennale and, indirectly, as a way to fight against the static and archaic nationalism of the pavilions in the Giardini.
El Anatsui coined the term "nomadic aesthetic" to describe his works. Though monumental, his pieces are indeed not fixed but fluid and they can therefore be folded for easy transportation and arranged in different configurations, depending from the place where they are installed and by the curators mounting them. They are therefore geographically and formally nomadic pieces supporting an aesthetic fluidity of ideas, impermanence and indeterminacy. So, hopefully, the Golden Lion to El Anatsui will also remind us about the humanitarian crisis in the Mediterranean and about all those migrants who, fleeing from the Middle East and Northern Africa, became the victims of tragic shipwrecks.
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