Small things can travel far. El Anatsui’s installation at the Turbine Hall in 2023–24 is another case in point. The artist’s trademark sculptures are comprised of recycled metal bottle caps and foil. For Behind the Red Moon (2024), the crimson-colored side of the sculpture Act I: The Red Moon faced the Tate’s entrance ramp, canary yellow with sections in gold and taupe on the flip side. At the opposite end of the Hall, Act III: The Wall draped the space ceiling to floor in dark blacks and browns. In the lower quarter, patches appeared: bronze, canary yellow, mauve, chocolate. The back was comprised of yards and yards of silver, before shifting to the yellows and reds more familiar in his work. Act II: The World, a net-like mobile containing shapes of the human body, hung between the two—suspended from the same walkway that first housed Bourgeois’s imposing spider.
The magic of Anatsui’s work relies on the simplicity of its materials. Seen from afar, little gives away the fact that these often large works are built from thousands of pieces of recycled metal from glass bottles that once held liquor, drinks, and medicine. Punctured with an awl and linked with copper wire, the bottle caps’ impact has the potential to be as large as the labor to assemble them will allow.
I first saw Anatsui’s work in person nearly two decades ago. In the modestly sized October Gallery, his 2005 solo exhibition included works squeezed behind the café furniture. Close viewing was unavoidable. At the time I enthused about them as adaptations of the west African strip-weaving tradition of kente cloth. But despite the artist naming his early works a “cloth series,” textile associations haven’t always pleased the artist—perhaps a remaining legacy of the discomfort of trespassing the still-fraught boundary that separates art and craft.
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