El Anatsui at the Tate Modern

One of the most famous museums in the world, London's Tate Modern was once a massive coal power plant that supplied power to the City of London and the Southbank. Since it was turned into a museum of modern art, the Tate Modern's impressive Turbine Hall provides the perfect space for ambitious contemporary artists wanting to create monumental work.

Technicians installing El Anatsui's The World

Sculptor El Anatsui is one of those creators. A globally acclaimed artist who grew up in Ghana and has worked as department head and Professor of Sculpture at the University of Nigeria, El Anatsui makes gigantic installations from discarded bottle tops and other metal fragments.

His newest work in the Turbine Hall is called Behind the Red Moon. El Anatsui creates massive tapestries illustrating the history of colonialism, exploitation and the slave trade; the bottle tops are from goods which are still shipped around the world using some of the same trade routes that the galleons and slave ships used to steal the wealth and lives of colonised people.

The bottle tops and metal fragments are stitched together with copper wire into giant sheets, and the sheets put together and hung up to cascade from a height, displaying the patchwork illustrations. The patterns can evoke a ship sailing on the sea, a piece of bloodstained cloth, patterned clothing similar to the traditional wraps of Ghana and Nigeria, or even the continents of the Earth.

El Anatsui, Act III: The Wall, 2023

Even when the material of El Anatsui's hangings drape along the floor instead of hanging from the ceiling, the installation is arranged in folds and ripples like waves coming up the shore, or the hem of a dress pooling at someone's feet. The metal pieces twinkle and shimmer, reminding us of the beauty and riches of these proud countries turned into commercial trade and everyday objects.

El Anatsui, Act I: The Red Moon, 2023

The first installation, Act I: The Red Moon, resembles a massive billowing ship's sail with a giant red "blood moon" on one side. Sailors would use the moon and stars to guide them along the trade routes. Here the moon is depicted as if under eclipse, its face covered with the blood of innocents. 

Act I: The Red Moon and Act II: The World,
seen from the mezzanine bridge in the Turbine Hall

The other side of the sail is a bright golden colour, the colour of the sun and of the riches the colonisers earned on the backs of the people they conquered. Anatsui's work makes it clear that as long as these riches are still held by colonisers, the crimes they committed are not left in the past.

Act II: The World (side view)

Act II: The World is a series of dangling shapes made of mesh. More bottle top seals are woven into metallic, transparent silhouettes that resemble human figures. Walking around it one way, the figures seem to cluster together into a circle resembling a child's drawing of the Earth. Walking around it another way, the figures seem to separate and scatter, drifting far apart.

Act II: The World, 2023
photo courtesy of Tate Modern

I use multiple elements to talk about the world: not a world made up of just one culture, but a world shaped by all of us coming together.

El Anatsui

The sculpture, its circular shape echoing the "blood moon" of Act I, looks like the Earth made out of people, breaking apart and coming together again. Anatsui has spoken of this as breaking apart but also reforming: cultures and civilisations were broken, but over centuries these fragmented people have been forging new lives and connections.

Act III: The Wall, 2023

Act III: The Wall is a glimmering black curtain that falls from the ceiling rafters to form deep puddling folds on the floor, with a mosaic-like depiction of a sailing ship travelling over the shimmering dark waves.

In contrast with the black metal scales of its surroundings, the "ship" glimmers with gold and jewel-like colours, implying the wealth carried by Spanish galleons and English merchant ships in the "great" Age of Colonization. Like the other installations, The Wall invites viewers to walk all around it, examining the tiny bottle lids and foils that construct it as well as its giant mural and rich patterns.

This installation specifically tells the ancient story of the earthen wall of Notsie (present-day Togo). Built by King Agokoli to confine and oppress his subjects, a revolutionary uprising by the Ewe people led to the wall’s destruction and the Ewe’s escape. The tapestry symbolises both earthen wall and diaspora ship, landing on foreign shores. Anatsui's use of the colour black, says the Tate website, "refers to the continent of Africa and its global diaspora, charged with the potential of homecoming and return."

His work is massive, moving and a vivid reminder not just of the atrocities committed against African peoples, but also of the imagination, capability and sense for beauty of contemporary African artists - not only the equal of European or American modern artists, but with a passion and drive uniquely their own.