Chika Okeke-Agulu lecture: El Anatsui's Metamorphic Objects

Chika Okeke-Agulu, Princeton University Professor of African and African Diaspora Art, will discuss El Anatsui’s shape-shifting, now globally-familiar monumental sculptures constructed from repurposed, locally manufactured objects such as bottle tops, aluminum plates, and rusted steel graters used for processing garri, a West African staple food.

In March 2019, Okeke-Agulu co-curated an exhibition of El Anatsui’s work at the Haus der Kunst Museum in Munich, Germany. It was one of the largest solo exhibitions of a Black African artist in Europe. Professor Okeke-Agulu will discuss his curation of the show as well as the existential and philosophical orders that inform an understanding of El Anatsui’s art in the global contemporary art scene today.

As an art historian Professor Okeke-Agulu proposes that El Anutsui’s metal sculptures – in addition to their astonishing visual splendor, and surprising fusion of form, color, and movement – “simultaneously evoke Africa’s rich artistic traditions, the ravages of slavery and colonialism, the distress of the postcolonial condition, processes of climate change, and the complicated modalities of political and cultural globalization.”