El AnatsuiFreedom, 2021
In ‘Freedom’, El Anatsui brings his signature approach to material and scale into sharp focus, using found aluminium, copper wire, and nylon string to create a vast, topographical composition. Intricate traces and woven outlines form layered networks that recall maps or aerial landscapes visualising pathways, borders, and the entangled histories they carry. Anatsui’s use of everyday materials, drawn from his immediate environment, grounds the work in the language of reuse, while also destabilising fixed ideas of place and belonging.
The surface of ‘Freedom’ is alive with tension and fluidity. Lines loop and intersect, challenging spatial hierarchies and resisting containment. Amid this complex web, three birds emerge – what Anatsui calls “birds of freedom” or “birds with the freedom to soar.” Their presence suggests a quiet defiance: a refusal to be hemmed in by the borders and bureaucracies that restrict human movement. As with much of his practice, Anatsui’s engagement with abstraction serves a deeply political function. ‘Freedom’ does not offer a single, resolved image, but rather a space of possibility where direction is uncertain, flight is still imaginable, and the contours of liberation are continually redrawn.
