El Anatsui: Behind the Red Moon / Turbine Hall, Tate Modern

Since Tate Modern opened in 2000, The Turbine Hall has hosted some great works of contemporary art. This year, the Ghanaian artist El Anatsui has been commissioned to produce an artwork for the vast industrial space. El Anatsui created a monumental 3-part sculptural installation made of thousands of metal bottle tops and fragments have been stitched together.
El Anatsui: Behind the Red Moon / Turbine Hall, Tate Modern. London (UK), October 9, 2023.
Press text (excerpt):
Hyundai Commission: El Anatsui: Behind the Red Moon is staged in three acts which visitors are invited to move between. The first hanging, titled ‘The Red Moon’, resembles the majestic sail of a ship billowing out in the wind, announcing the beginning of a journey across the Atlantic Ocean. Red liquor bottle tops form the outline of a red moon, or ‘blood moon’, as it appears during a lunar eclipse. The second sculpture, ‘The World’, is composed of many individual layers that evoke human figures suspended in a restless state. The ethereal appearance of these figures is achieved using thin bottle-top seals wired together to create a net-like material. When viewed from a particular vantage point, these scattered shapes come together into a single circular form of the Earth. In Anatsui’s final hanging, ‘The Wall’, a monumental black sheet of metal cloth stretches from floor to ceiling. At its base, pools of bottle tops rise from the ground in the form of crashing waves and rocky peaks. Behind its black surface, a delicate structure of shimmering silver is revealed, covered in a mosaic of multi-coloured pieces. This combination of lines and waves, blackness and technicolour, echoes the collision of global cultures and hybrid identities that Anatsui invites us to consider throughout his work.
Viewing all three hangings together from afar reveals a landscape of symbols: the moon, the sail, the wave, the earth, and the wall. Up close, the logos on the bottle tops speak of the material’s social histories, referencing a present-day industry built on colonial trade routes. The past and present of Africa and Europe converge into symphonic sculptural forms that hang in the air and appear to float across the space. Through the poetic use of material as metaphor, Hyundai Commission: El Anatsui: Behind the Red Moon explores elemental forces interwoven with human histories of power, oppression, dispersion and survival.
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