El Anatsui works with found objects and everyday materials to create imposing installations that interrogate colonial imports, consumption, and waste. Trained in art at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science & Technology in Ghana, he rose to acclaim with his large-scale works made of bottle tops. He received the Golden Lion award for Lifetime Achievement at La Biennale di Venezia 2015. While his work repurposes discarded resources such as bottle caps and cassava graters, it is his meticulous transformation of these scraps into precisely composed, tapestry-like sculptures that underscore the formal brilliance of his visual language. Anatsui spent four decades teaching sculpture at the Fine and Applied Art department at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. He is a member of the Nsukka Group artist collective, which incorporates and adapts the traditional, abstracted designs of the Igbo people into contemporary practices.

The artist’s installation Logoligi Logarithm (2019) borrows its title from a poem by the Ghanaian poet, and late friend of the artist, Atukwei Okai, who used the word “logoligi”—meaning “snake-like” or “indirect” in the Niger-Congo language of Ga—to suggest the bureaucratic obstacles that convolute a political system, making it an impenetrable mathematical equation. Anatsui’s evocatively labyrinth-like structure comprises veils of intricately stitched patterns of bottle-cap seals draped on aluminum tubes to form pathways at once translucent and opaque. The “walls” do not define the space so much as serve as liminal demarcations of shifting spatial possibilities, which push the boundaries of what Anatsui calls the “unfixed form.”