El AnatsuiUntitled (Red Shifting Sands), 2024
Celebrated for his expansive sculptures crafted from repurposed consumer materials, El Anatsui transforms everyday detritus – such as aluminium bottle tops, foil seals, and cassava graters – into vast, luminous compositions rich in both visual presence and conceptual nuance. Since the early 2000s, he has collaborated with teams of assistants to cut, compress, and bind these elements with copper wire, producing monumental works that hover between sculpture, textile, and installation. While echoing the aesthetics of Ghanaian Kente cloth and ritual garments, the materials themselves evoke histories of trade, excess, and global movement from the structures of colonial commerce to contemporary patterns of waste.
Anatsui’s practice resists categorisation. His metal wall hangings are deliberately adaptable, taking on new configurations with each display depending on spatial context and curatorial vision. This openness to change reflects a broader preoccupation with transformation across material, cultural, and historical registers. In ‘Red Shifting Sands’, the prominence of red suggests vitality and flux: red as heat, signal or soil – coloured by urgency and transition. Throughout his work, Anatsui weaves together themes of environmental fragility, colonial aftermath, and the enduring capacity for renewal, challenging viewers to see discarded matter not as waste, but as a medium charged with memory and possibility.
