Edinburgh Art Festival reviews: El Anatsui | Ibrahim Mahama | Ade Adesina | Tayo Adekunle

Installation by Ibrahim Mahama PIC: Courtesy of Talbot Rice Gallery | Talbot Rice Gallery

El Anatsui: Scottish Mission Book Depot Keta, Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh ****

Ibrahim Mahama: Songs About Roses, Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh ****

Ade Adesina: Intersection, Edinburgh Printmakers ****

Tayo Adekunle: Stories of the Unseen, Edinburgh Printmakers ***

Although Edinburgh Art Festival’s own commissions don’t start until 8 August, there is already plenty to see across the city in the festival’s partner galleries. This year, perhaps more by coincidence than intent, there is a strong thread of work with its origins in West Africa.

Now aged 80, El Anatsui is one of Ghana’s most celebrated artists. Just last year, he unveiled his largest artwork to date, a commission for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, and this show is a coup for Talbot Rice, exploring his practice in some depth.

Anatsui’s best known works are made by stitching together bottle tops and neck pieces from the bottling industry in Ghana and Nigeria to make wall-hangings. These can be monumental in size, like 2013’s TSIATSIA - Searching for Connection which hangs on the outside of the gallery in the Old College quad, or the title piece for this show, the 13-metre long Scottish Mission Book Depot Keta. Filling the largest wall of the White Gallery, this recalls the Scottish Mission Book Depot where Anatsui bought school books and art materials before Ghanaian independence in 1957. 

Journeying through the gallery, we are invited to explore earlier works, such as wood relief sculptures, where it’s possible to see the roots of his current practice: making a bigger thing out of many parts, creating panels which begin to look like textiles.

One of his earliest bottle top works is here, the beautiful shimmering Women’s Cloth. Working in this medium, he discovered he could make sculptures with fluidity and movement which can be draped differently for each exhibition. It gave him a way of working which spoke directly to the territory he wanted to explore: embodying the legacy of the past (spirits were introduced to West Africa by colonial powers to trade for gold, then for enslaved people) and speaking to the forging of a country, one thing made of many disparate parts. The hangings have names like Freedom and Sovereignty.

He is also doing something akin to abstract painting. Scottish Mission Book Depot Keta is like a piece of abstract expressionism, a rich, blistering yellow, with traces of red and blue, like a child’s first scribbles. Other works are patterned, or irregularly shaped. Forms are abstracted and often seen from above, like the monarch in Royal Slumber, who “sleeps” in the darkened Round Room. The meanings of these works are more opaque that they first suggest, so it’s worth spending longer with them and looking past the shiny metal to what lies beneath.

Ibrahim Mahama, also from Ghana but a generation younger, is best known for the way he uses raw materials from his native land to make striking artworks, like the sackcloth which swathed the Arsenale in Venice in 2015 or the old train parts used to create Parliament of Ghosts, shown at the Whitworth in Manchester and in Venice is 2023. 

Trains are important to Mahama, and his show of largely new work at the Fruitmarket responds to the gallery’s position over the railway station. Mahama has ploughed much of the proceeds from his art into an art and education complex in Ghana and has collected railway lines, engines and carriages from the now defunct colonial-era railway to use as building materials, exhibits and classrooms.

Installation view of work by Ibrahim Mahama at Fruitmarket | Courtesy of Fruitmarket Gallery

The physical work of moving this material around is his main subject here. He draws monumental pictures in charcoal of young Ghanaians carrying sections of railway line on the old order books of the Ghana Industrial Holding Company (GIHOC), set up just after independence. There are also photographs and film of this work, and of large groups of people hauling rusting engines. It’s not the first time an artist has drawn on a fascination for physical labour, and it’s all beautifully realised. Work inspired by the tattoos of itinerant workers - used to identify their bodies in case of accident - is powerful and evocative.

But there’s also something else going on. In these images of work, at least some of which were staged for this purpose, there is a recalling of a past era, work gangs of shirtless labourers sweating it out for colonial powers. In the warehouse space, he combines a film installation from 2019 with new drawings of railway workers pre-independence, mounted on constructions of sleepers and rails. Details from the locomotives tell us where they were made: Preston, Leeds, Glasgow.

It’s as if he’s trying to summon up the idealism of the newly independent nation: the soundtrack is of a young woman reading a speech from one of the early parliaments. Embedded in an honouring of the workers who went before, there’s a rallying cry to the nation as it is now. While there is much to admire here, there’s a sense that we, in Edinburgh, are not its key audience. Lacking the resonance of a work like Parliament of Ghosts, this work doesn’t quite make the leap from specific to universal.

Meanwhile, Nigerian-British printmaker Ade Adesina presents a new body of work at Edinburgh Printmakers. Based in Aberdeen and recently honoured with a major award and exhibition in France, Adesina is known for his astonishingly skilled woodcuts and linocuts, and there are plenty of these here, as well as experiments with lithography, screenprinting and etching, and some early forays into colour. 

Adesina has his own language of symbols which recur in his work: clouds, road signs, baobab trees, a clock, a compass, a step ladder. He draws architecture beautifully, ditto animals (look out for the giant panda in a claw-foot bath) and leaves much of the interpretation open to the viewer, but often has his finger on current issues: climate change is often present, and the biggest work here, the six-panel relief Salt Lake, is an allegory on migration.

Griot by Ade Adesina | Courtesy of Edinburgh Printmakers

It’s a pleasure just to look at draftsmanship of this calibre: an egg resting on a feather, a work called Under the Gray Sky which seems to celebrate Aberdeenshire, adding hay bales, a pheasant and a set of golf clubs into the mix of images. A rare self portrait, Griot, positions him as the storyteller of West African tradition, one who navigates a world of symbols, and lays a trail of them for others. 

Amongst pictures which conjure objects so beautifully, the installation of a step ladder and doors feels a little unnecessary, and the experiments, while meticulous, are clearly just beginning. But its exciting to see an artist of Adesina’s ability stretching beyond his comfort zone and embracing new possibilities.

The upstairs gallery at Printmakers shows work by another British-Nigerian artist, Tayo Adekunle, who works mainly in photography. She is engaged with recovering stories, remaking images of blackness which have been misappropriated or misunderstood.

On one side of the gallery, she uses self-portraiture to restore the dignity and beauty of black women grotesquely objectified in pseudo-ethnographic photographs made by colonial figures like Prince Roland Bonaparte. In a powerful series of Artefacts, she adds herself, digitally, to images from Bonaparte’s collection, subjecting the women he photographed to her own empathetic gaze. On the other side, she summons Esù-Elegára, the Yoruba messenger to the gods, wrongly interpreted by Christian missionaries as the devil, and places him back in his own authentic story.

El Anatsui: Scottish Mission Book Depot Keta ends 29 September; Ibrahim Mahama: Songs About Roses ends 6 October; Ade Adesina: Intersection and Tayo Adekunle: Stories of the Unseen end 10 November