The Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern in London is somewhat infamous for the artworks it has gobbled up over the years. Measuring over 35,000 square feet, it is the Hall’s 115-foot height, as much as its footprint, that overwhelms. At the turn of the millennium, the first commission went to the artist Louise Bourgeois. Three viewing towers were installed on the ground floor with one of her trademark steel spider sculptures positioned on the Hall’s bridge. The spider held its own in the space.
In the years since, the Turbine Hall has dominated more artworks than it has favoured. Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth (2007–8) remains the most memorable exception to this rule: a simple fissure that ran the length of the Hall’s concrete floor has left its scar to this day. The work’s title refers to how pronunciation can be used to verify identity—words that confirm, or deny, a particular group.
Ai Wei Wei’s Sunflower Seeds (2010–11) also kept itself close to the floor. But once barriers were erected to prevent the public from inhaling the dust inadvertently raised by walking across the porcelain sunflower seeds, interaction—at least underfoot—became impossible. One of the cleverer curatorial interventions I have come across was when Day+Gluckman included sunflower seeds the public had lifted from the installation in their 2013 show Couriers of Taste. Pocketing one or two might seem benign, but the call revealed that some had helped themselves to quite a few more seeds than that.
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.
Today Anatsui runs studios in Nigeria, where he lived for forty-five years and taught at the University of Nigeria, and Ghana where he was born. He employs close to one hundred assistants who contribute to the lengthy process of assembling the modest parts that make his dramatic wholes. While the labor involved in the sculptures’ assembly isn’t the whole point, the incremental building of vast surfaces from mundane detritus seems to me to be at least part of the meaning. Transport—both of bodies and materials—as part of colonial trade and contemporary globalization is another uncomfortable reality the works evoke.
When the British sugar magnate Henry Tate donated his collection and provided the initial funding for what is now known as Tate Britain on the north bank of the Thames, he may have been hard pressed to imagine the scale of the Tate Modern today. The museum’s website is at pains to point out that their namesake was born after the abolition of slavery. Nonetheless inextricable ties remain between the movement of goods such as sugar and the history of enslaved lives. On the Tate’s wall Anatsui’s voice navigated these difficult legacies:
Tate & Lyle sugar was the only brand we used during my childhood in the Gold Coast.
I came to understand that the sugar industry grew from
the transatlantic trade and
the movement of goods and people.
My idea is to play with all these elements.
Jessica Hemmings writes about textiles. She edited The Textile Reader (2012/2023), an anthology of critical and creative writing about textiles and is professor of craft at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg, Sweden.
Related Stories
