As of the 30th of September 2024, ‘El Anatsui: After the Red Moon’ is on its inaugural global tour commencing at Museum of Art Pudong (MAP), Shanghai. This global tour will run until the 7th of October 2025. Ghanaian artist El Anatsui is one of the most influential artists today, and was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015. This monumental installation was originally conceived and commissioned as the Hyundai Commission: El Anatsui: Behind the Red Moon for Tate Modern, London in 2023-2024. This exhibition is one of MAP’s latest collaborative projects with Tate.
‘After the Red Moon’ is a sublime sculptural installation made of thousands of metal bottle tops and fragments crumpled, crushed and stitched into different compositions. The large panels are pieced together to form massive abstract fields of colour, shape and line. The installation builds on Anatsui’s interest in histories of encounter and the migration of goods and people during the transatlantic slave trade. Sourced in Nigeria, the liquor bottle tops used in this commission form part of a present-day industry built on colonial trade routes.
Visitors are invited to embark on a journey of intimate movement and interaction through the hangings, bodies and sculptures. Viewing the installations from afar, a landscape of symbols is revealed: the moon, the sail, the wave, the earth and the wall. Up close, the bottle tops’ logos speak to the material’s social lives as commodities of a global industry built on colonial trade routes. Together, Africa’s past, present and global diaspora merge into sculptural forms that hang in the air and appear to float across the space. The hangings embody Anatsui’s idea of the ‘non-fixed form’ and are part of his highly experimental approach to sculpture.
Anatsui’s metal hangings constitute the largest installation-based exhibition that MAP has held to date. The exhibition not only transforms Hall X but also occupies the entrance lobby. Staged in three acts, the artwork consists of ‘The Waves’, ‘The World’ and ‘The Wall.’ ‘The Waves’ was specially redesigned in a site-specific response to MAP’s waterfront architecture and its location at the graceful bend of the Huangpu River. In response to bustling port cultures, this newly conceived iteration is inspired by the seafaring journey Anatsui’s materials have taken, from Ghana to the UK and now to China.
‘The World’ is composed of condensed, transparent sculptures hanging in the middle of the entrance hall suggesting a loose grouping of human figures that converge into the single circular form of the Earth. ‘The Wall’ concludes the narrative with a monumental black wall stretching from floor to ceiling in Hall X. From the front it resembles crashing waves, whereas from behind we discover an expressive explosion of texture and colour that conjures a sense of release and hope. ‘After the Red Moon’ explores elemental forces interwoven with human histories of power, dispersion and survival. Revealing the poetic possibilities of his materials, Anatsui explores the entangled relationships and geographies that bind us together. ‘El Anatsui: After the Red Moon’ is accompanied by a Soundscape composed by Ghanaian-British sound artist Peter Adjaye. The series of immersive soundscapes can be experienced by scanning the QR code on site at MAP.
