El Anatsui, Za, 2025. Aluminium bottlecaps and copper wire, 271 × 318 cm. Courtesy the artist and Efie Gallery, Dubai.
María Magdalena Campos-Pons
Memory, migration and belonging
b. 1959, Matanzas, Cuba · Lives and works in Nashville, Tennessee
Photography, sculpture, painting, installation and performance carry personal memory, ancestral histories and migration.
Drawing on her Afro-Cuban and Chinese heritage, she moves between the intimate and the monumental, treating body, landscape and material culture as vessels of memory. Behold (2023), organised by the Brooklyn Museum and the J. Paul Getty Museum, was the first multimedia survey of her work since 2007. Her works are held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
This year she shows with Kamaal Malak at the 61st Venice Biennale (Anatomy of the Magnolia Tree for Koyo Kouoh and Toni Morrison, on view until 22 November, the closing day of Frieze Abu Dhabi). Efie presented I am soil, my tears are water in Dubai, her first solo exhibition in the region.
El Anatsui
The transformation of matter
b. 1944, Anyako, Ghana · Studios in Nsukka and Tema
Fragments of discarded bottle caps, wood and found materials become monumental forms between sculpture, textile and architecture.
His metal assemblages, built from thousands of pieces, hold histories of trade, consumption and colonial exchange. Never fixed, they respond to the spaces in which they hang.
Anatsui received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 2015 Venice Biennale; his work is in the collections of Tate, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the British Museum. Efie Gallery opened its Dubai space with Shard Song, his first solo exhibition in Dubai, and later presented Music, Change and Re-Invention, drawn from his personal vinyl collection, in the Rekord Gallery.
Abdoulaye Konaté
Colour as a universal language
b. 1953, Diré, Mali · Lives and works in Bamako
Strips of dyed cloth, arranged with painterly rigour, join West African textile traditions to a contemporary language of abstraction.
Colour, rhythm and material carry reflections on identity, spirituality, the environment and politics. His work is held by the Centre Pompidou, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate and Louvre Abu Dhabi, where his 2024 textile Tuareg Pattern on a Blue Background from the Sahel and the Sahara will be shown in Living Legacies, on view 25 November 2026 – 25 April 2027.
Efie presented Sambadio (Oct 2024 – Jan 2025), his Middle East solo debut, with a 132-page catalogue featuring Simon Njami (The Prism of Light), Yacouba Konaté, Ousseynou Wade and Awa Konaté, and a studio film shot in Bamako.
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