On 30 September 2024, El Anatsui: After the Red Moon embarks upon its inaugural global tour commencing at Museum of Art Pudong (MAP), Shanghai. This exhibition is one of MAP’s latest collaborative projects with Tate. Staged as a monumental installation in three acts, the Ghanaian artist El Anatsui’s cascading metal hangings not only transforms MAP’s most unique exhibition space, Hall X, but also occupies the Entrance Hall for the first time. This exhibition was originally conceived and commissioned as the Hyundai Commission: El Anatsui: Behind the Red Moon for Tate Modern, London in 2023–2024.

As one of the most influential artists today, El Anatsui was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015. El Anatsui: After the Red Moon constitutes the largest installation-based exhibition that MAP has held to date. Thousands of repurposed liquor bottle tops and metal fragments have been crumpled, crushed, and connected by hand with copper wire into unique abstract compositions that are flexible and adaptable to change, creating a sublime visual effect. These undulating and metamorphosing forms, which are the artist’s largest work thus far, flow through MAP’s vast interior spaces, reflecting on the expanse of human history and the elemental power of the natural world.

Audiences are invited to embark on a journey of movement and interaction through the free-flowing hangings, which open up different ways of looking. Revealing the poetic possibilities of his materials, Anatsui explores the entangled relationships and geographies that bind us together. Each sculpture refers to Anatsui’s interest in the movement and migration of goods and people during the transatlantic slave trade.

The three acts featured in El Anatsui: After the Red Moon are respectively: Act I: The Waves, Act II: The World, and Act III: The Wall. The first hanging, titled 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 second sculpture, The World, is composed of many individual layers that evoke human figures suspended in a restless state. The ethereal appearance of these figures is achieved using thin bottle top seals wired together to create a net-like material.

When viewed from a particular vantage point on the second floor, these scattered shapes come together into a single circular form of the Earth. In Anatsui’s final hanging, The Wall, a monumental black sheet of woven metal cloth stretches from floor to ceiling. At its base, pools of bottle tops rise from the ground in the form of crashing waves and rocky peaks. Behind its black surface, a delicate structure of shimmering silver is revealed, covered in a mosaic of multi-coloured pieces. This combination of lines and waves, blackness and technicolour, echoes the collision of global cultures and hybrid identities that Anatsui invites us to consider throughout his work.

Viewing all three hangings together from afar reveals a landscape of symbols: the moon, the sail, the wave, the earth, and the wall. Up close, the logos on the bottle tops speak of the material’s social histories, referencing a present-day industry built on colonial trade routes. The past and present of Africa and its diasporas converge into symphonic sculptural forms that hang in the air and appear to float across the space. Through the poetic use of material as metaphor, El Anatsui: After the Red Moon explores elemental forces interwoven with human histories of power, dispersion, and survival. Furthermore, the exhibition 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.

El Anatsui: After the Red Moon is produced by Lujiazui Development (Group) Co., Ltd, and co-organized by MAP and Tate. This exhibition was originally conceived and commissioned as the Hyundai Commission: El Anatsui: Behind the Red Moon for Tate Modern, London 2023–2024; where it was curated by Osei Bonsu, Curator, International Art and Dina Akhmadeeva, Assistant Curator, International Art. El Anatsui: After the Red Moon is part of a global tour organised by Tate Gallery and is managed by Katherine Finerty, Project Curator, and Hannah Cassens Marshall, Exhibitions Assistant, Tate International Partnerships.

https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/el-anatsui

ABOUT EL ANATSUI

El Anatsui was born in Anyako, Ghana in 1944. He has predominantly lived and worked in Nigeria, and is currently based in Ghana. His highly experimental approach to sculpture embraces a wide range of forms and materials, including wood, ceramics, and found objects. He has experimented with liquor bottle tops since the late 1990s and continues to push the medium’s boundaries in novel ways. Aided in his studio by dozens of assistants, Anatsui and his team work together to stitch and assemble his metallic hangings. Embodying Anatsui’s idea of the ‘non-fixed form’, the hangings fold easily in order to travel, and appear different each time they are installed. Interested in the changing histories of the objects he repurposes, Anatsui fuses specific local aesthetic traditions with the global history of abstraction. His choice of materials embodies ideas that have shaped his career over several decades, including the evolution of human civilisation, African decolonisation movements, histories of migration and encounter, and life’s existential journeys.

Anatsui has exhibited around the world including recent solo projects at La Conciergerie, Paris (2021); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2019); Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha (2019); and Kunstmuseum Bern (2020). In 2023, El Anatsui’s largest work to date Behind the Red Moon was unveiled at the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall for the site-specific Hyundai Commission. He was recipient of the Charles Wollaston Award at the Royal Academy of Arts, London in 2013 and was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015. In 2019, a major installation was exhibited at Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA), Cape Town, and his work was included in the inaugural Ghana Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Anatsui’s work is held in permanent collections around the world including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC; The British Museum, London; and the Centre Pompidou, Paris. From 1996 to 2011 he also worked as Professor of Sculpture and Departmental Head at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.

ABOUT MAP

Located at the heart of Xiao Lujiazui, Museum of Art Pudong (MAP) broke ground on September 26, 2017 and opened to the public in July, 2021.

Invested, built, and managed by the Lujiazui Group and designed by Ateliers Jean Nouvel (AJN), MAP is primarily set out to present world-class exhibitions to its audience as well as showcasing domestic artists. The four major functions of MAP include: to hold exhibitions, to promote art education, to develop cultural merchandises, and to advocate for international exchange. MAP aims to become a new cultural landmark of Shanghai and an important platform for international cultural exchange.

ABOUT TATE

Tate is one of the United Kingdom’s national museums, and holds the national collections of British art from the 16th century and of modern and contemporary art from across the world. Tate has four galleries across the country: Tate Liverpool, Tate St Ives, Tate Britain, and Tate Modern. The largest, Tate Modern, opened in 2000 in a former power station beside the River Thames in central London; it is the most visited museum of modern and contemporary art in the world.