The West didn't always see that art exists everywhere

The latest artist to fill the Turbine Hall, EK Anatsui, wanted to speak to Tate’s murky history with the sugar trade, he tells Nancy Durrant

IT was meant to be sugar cane. When Tate came calling to invite the eminent Ghanaian artist El Anatsui to create a new installation for the Turbine Hall Hyundai Commission, his first idea was to plant a field of the plant. But annoyingly, they told him the Mexican artist Abraham Cruzvillegas had done something not dissimilar in the space in 2015.

Anatsui, now 81, knew that those white gold grains were the key, however. “I was born in the colonial Gold Coast [now independent Ghana] and I grew up knowing that Tate & Lyle benefited from the transatlantic trade. So I had to do something to do with that period, when the continents were linked, whether for good or bad,” he gives a slightly dark chuckle. “You can’t just avoid the transatlantic project.”

His second idea was to recreate the chapel of a slave castle — commercial forts that dot Ghana’s short coast, used to hold the human cargo before they were packed in their terrified hundreds into the stinking holds of ships to take them on to the Americas and the Caribbean. Anatsui visited the largest, Cape Coast Castle, and found that above the dank dungeons where the slaves were kept, stood a chapel.

“So the idea came to me to explore the interplay between the church and slavery,” he explains. In the end though, the frustrating dimensions of the Turbine Hall thwarted that idea too.