![]() To cherish a bottle top, it turns out, is to save the world.Įl Anatsui is at Tate Modern, London, 10 October to 14 April 2024. Sorry for the grammar, not a native English speaker. He reflects the peril of our world where people are treated like waste. Is it a vessel of hope or a ship of fools? El Anatsui catches so much in his reflective little bits of metal and glossed paper. The whole Turbine Hall suddenly resembles a ship, sailing into the future. The canopy at the entrance turns out, from this vantage point, to be a gigantic golden sail. Like Rodin’s Burghers of Calais, these fragile human souls have only each other. They are massed close together, like refugees on a raft, trying to help each other, swaying in a stately, anguished dance. They are human figures, silhouettes of people caught in the light. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.Ĭlimb the bridge that crosses the middle of the Turbine Hall and you can get close enough to decipher the shapes in the golden mobile. For more information see our Privacy Policy. Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. Daylight from above interacts with all the stuff he’s gathered in a symphony of endlessly changing, subtle, loving colours, that will be different through each day. Here, he recognises something no other artist has teased out of the Turbine Hall before: its superb natural light. I’ve usually seen El Anatsui’s works in more conventional museum spaces where they can only hint at that heavenly transformation – they don’t get enough light. It is light that can efface the physical, dissolve differences, erase boundaries and gather every shiny little individual element into a glimmering oneness. The imagination sees waves, troughs, an ocean of colour even as you rationally recognise all the little bits of salvaged scrap. ![]() ![]() It seems to happen right before your eyes. It’s a baffling alchemical transmutation. The transformation you witness in these works is not just a neat academic idea. People as well as bottle tops are gathered up on his ark. Yet he is a poet, not a protester, and his found stuff suggests not just literal rubbish but human waste. El Anatsui started making art as a reclamation of the industrial world’s detritus in the 1970s and this has added urgency with every new degree of climate crisis. You quickly grasp the moral significance. It may seem simple enough to accept that everything in his Tate installation is made from discarded rubbish. Mystical … El Anatsui at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall.
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