From a distance it looks ugly and apocalyptic, like a burned-out curtain. But approach the biggest of the three hangings dropping from the heights of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall and a miracle begins. What seemed to be dingy and melancholy becomes radiant and weightless, holding and treasuring light from above before releasing it as starshine. Your eyes are kissed by the onrush of colours – gold, bronze, black – all emerging from a complex dance of squares and rectangles that float in the air like spangles of glowing dust.
El Anatsui, the Nigeria-based Ghanaian giant of contemporary art, has created a redemptive masterpiece. This colossal space always had the capacity to be a modern cathedral but few artists commissioned to work here have dared to treat it in such a romantic, ecstatic way. El Anatsui does. His translucent mystical hangings finally give this grey void the stained glass windows it needs.
Seizing beauty from despair, hope from dereliction is the theme of El Anatsui’s art and the closer you get, the more intensely paradoxical it is. As you walk in, you are greeted by a red and gold canopy overhead, like a tent in the desert. Beyond, there’s a ragged metallic hanging that reminded me of a mobile. Then you approach the rugged-looking, bleak-seeming fabric slung up at the far end of the space, which flows right down to the floor and carries on over the concrete, like waves polluted by an oil slick.
You need to go right up to these folds and dips of shiny material to see their true nature. Out of the flow of colour, words materialise, from “Brandy” to “Goya Beans”. This entire cascade of intricate reflective colours is made up of reused rubbish, a myriad of commercial labels cut up and stitched together. It is truly mystifying. How can such beauty come from so much trash?
It may seem simple enough to accept that everything in his Tate installation is made from discarded rubbish. You quickly grasp the moral significance. 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. Yet he is a poet, not a protester, and his found stuff suggests not just literal rubbish but human waste. People as well as bottle tops are gathered up on his ark.
The transformation you witness in these works is not just a neat academic idea. It’s a baffling alchemical transmutation. It seems to happen right before your eyes. The imagination sees waves, troughs, an ocean of colour even as you rationally recognise all the little bits of salvaged scrap.
The key is light. It is light that can efface the physical, dissolve differences, erase boundaries and gather every shiny little individual element into a glimmering oneness. 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. Here, he recognises something no other artist has teased out of the Turbine Hall before: its superb natural light. 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.
It is impossible to quite believe these lovely images come from what usually ends up in waste piles at the edge of cities, or barges heading to poisoned islands, but you nevertheless know it to be true. That knowledge keeps Anatsui’s art on this earth, and gives it rare depth. It is indeed heartbreakingly poised between desolation and hope.
Climb the bridge that crosses the middle of the Turbine Hall and you can get close enough to decipher the shapes in the golden mobile. They are human figures, silhouettes of people caught in the light. They are massed close together, like refugees on a raft, trying to help each other, swaying in a stately, anguished dance. Like Rodin’s Burghers of Calais, these fragile human souls have only each other. We only have each other. We are scrap with a soul.
The canopy at the entrance turns out, from this vantage point, to be a gigantic golden sail. The whole Turbine Hall suddenly resembles a ship, sailing into the future. 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. He reflects the peril of our world where people are treated like waste. To cherish a bottle top, it turns out, is to save the world.
El Anatsui is at Tate Modern, London, 10 October to 14 April 2024.
