The Alchemy of Refusal: El Anatsui and the Art of Making Empires Visible Through Their Waste

The Alchemy of Refusal: El Anatsui and the Art of Making Empires Visible Through Their Waste

At 81, the Ghanaian sculptor is not slowing down. Between a Tate Turbine Hall commission, the Vienna State Opera, and a return to the wood that started it all, El Anatsui is redefining what a late career looks like — and what African art demands of the institutions that collect it.

By MoMAA Editorial

Published February 2026  |  Reading time: 13 minutes

Consider, for a moment, the bottle cap. A small disc of pressed aluminium, crimped around the neck of a liquor bottle somewhere in West Africa, pried off and discarded. It is, by any conventional measure, worthless — literally the last thing you touch before you throw it away. Now consider that same bottle cap flattened, stitched with copper wire to thousands of its kind, and assembled into a shimmering wall of metal cloth that cascades across the facade of a building, or billows through the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern, or commands $2.3 million at Christie’s. The distance between those two states — between waste and wonder, between discard and desire — is the territory El Anatsui has spent a quarter-century mapping.

But the hype narratives around Anatsui — and they are abundant, with headlines breathlessly declaring scrap metal turned into gold — tend to miss the sharper point. These are not merely stories of material transformation. They are arguments about visibility. Every bottle cap in an Anatsui installation arrived in West Africa via trade routes that began as colonial infrastructure and persist as global commodity networks. The logos stamped on them — Elliott Dark Rum, Seaman’s Schnapps, Nigerian Guinness — are the brand identities of an industry built on centuries of extraction. When Anatsui stitches them into luminous tapestries and hangs them in the institutions of former colonial powers, he is not recycling. He is making empires visible through their waste.

In 2025, at 81, Anatsui is experiencing not a late-career plateau but a remarkable creative expansion — returning to wood, his original medium, while simultaneously designing a safety curtain for the Vienna State Opera, featuring prominently in Tate Modern’s landmark Nigerian Modernism exhibition, and delivering a keynote address at the International Council of Museums in Dubai on the future of cultural institutions. The question is no longer whether El Anatsui matters. It is what his trajectory reveals about the structural shifts reshaping who gets to tell art history, and from where.

From Anyako to Nsukka: The Education of an Alchemist

El Anatsui was born in 1944 in Anyako, a coastal town in Ghana’s Volta Region — the son of a master weaver of Kente cloth. That biographical detail, which critics love to cite as a neat origin story for his textile-like metal works, is both relevant and insufficient. Kente cloth is not just fabric; it is a sophisticated system of visual communication, with specific patterns carrying specific meanings, woven into a material form that holds cultural authority. The principle that materials carry meaning beyond their physical properties — that a piece of cloth can be a declaration of status, a historical record, and an aesthetic object simultaneously — is foundational to everything Anatsui would later create.

He studied sculpture at the College of Art, University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, where he was steeped in both African philosophical traditions and European modernism. In 1975, he moved to Nigeria to take up a teaching position at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where he would remain for four decades. Nsukka was not a provincial backwater but a crucible of artistic experimentation. The Nsukka group, which Anatsui joined, was developing a distinctly African idiom within contemporary art — drawing on Igbo uli traditions, Nsibidi writing systems, and local material cultures while engaging critically with international modernism. Anatsui’s formation was, from the start, both deeply local and fiercely cosmopolitan.

His early work moved through a sequence of material investigations that mapped the life cycles of objects. In Ghana, he carved and engraved wooden trays — the kind used in markets to display goods — impressing them with Adinkra symbols using hot irons. In Nsukka, he turned to ceramics, fascinated by the broken pots from sacrificial rituals at local shrines and by the region’s ancient Nok terracotta figures. He was drawn to what happens to objects after they cease to function in their intended way — the moment a pot breaks and enters a different order of meaning. Then came the chainsaw sculptures: wooden wall panels with surfaces scarred and textured by power tools, their grooves and burns creating patterns that recalled both traditional scarification and industrial violence.

Each phase was a rehearsal for what came next. The trays taught him about the object as social surface. The ceramics taught him about fracture and recombination. The chainsaws taught him about the expressive potential of damage. By the time he discovered that bag of discarded bottle caps on a roadside near Nsukka in the late 1990s, he was ready to recognise what they were: not waste, but a material lexicon waiting for a syntax.

Bottle Caps and the Archaeology of Trade

The bottle-cap works that have made Anatsui internationally famous operate on a deceptively simple principle. Thousands of aluminium caps — flattened, folded, cut, crimped — are stitched together with copper wire into sheets of metal cloth that can be draped, hung, folded, and reconfigured for each installation. They shimmer like Byzantine mosaics. They drape like Kente. They cascade like waterfalls. They refuse to hold a single form, changing with each display, responding to the architecture they inhabit. Anatsui has insisted that his works embody “the non-fixed form” — they are never installed the same way twice, which means they exist as something between sculpture, painting, textile, and architecture.

But the material is doing more than aesthetic work. The bottle caps come from distilleries in Nigeria and Ghana, and their logos trace a precise commercial geography. The liquor industry in West Africa is a direct descendant of colonial trade networks — spirits were among the primary commodities exchanged for enslaved people, and the brands that survive today are the inheritors of that history. When Anatsui exhibited 

Behind the Red Moon

 at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in 2023 — his largest-ever indoor installation — he was explicit about this connection. The Tate itself was founded by Henry Tate, whose sugar fortune was built on industries that, while post-slavery, were “constructed on the foundation of slavery in the 17th and 18th centuries, both in supply and in demand,” as the museum has acknowledged. Anatsui’s use of rum bottle caps inside that specific building was not coincidental. It was a precise act of material historiography.

The Turbine Hall commission, staged as an artwork in three acts, demonstrated the full range of Anatsui’s ambition. The first hanging, “The Red Moon,” assembled entirely from rum bottle caps, billowed like a ship’s sail — invoking the Middle Passage. The second, “The World,” used thin bottle-top seals wired into net-like material, creating ethereal figures that, from a specific vantage point, coalesced into a sphere. The third, “The Wall,” was a monumental black sheet of metal cloth that concealed, on its reverse, a mosaic of multicoloured pieces — a literal statement about what lies behind the visible surfaces of power. Anatsui was the first African artist selected for the Turbine Hall commission in its two-decade history.

The Market: Patience as Strategy

Anatsui’s market trajectory is instructive precisely because it defies the speculative dynamics that dominate much art-market discourse. His auction record of $2.3 million — set in May 2023 when 

Prophet

 (2012), a bottle-cap work, sold at Christie’s 21st Century Evening Sale, beating its estimate by 123% — is modest by the standards of blue-chip contemporary art. His previous record of $1.95 million, for 

New Layout

 (2009), had been set only two years earlier. The entire range of his auction results spans from $5,000 for prints and smaller works to the $2.3 million high.

These numbers tell a story of steady, institution-driven appreciation rather than speculative frenzy. Anatsui’s primary market is controlled through October Gallery in London and Goodman Gallery, which operates in Johannesburg, Cape Town, London, and New York. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou, the British Museum, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and many others. The Stedelijk and Kunstmuseum Bern jointly acquired a major work, demonstrating the kind of cross-institutional collaboration that signals genuine art-historical commitment rather than market opportunism.

For collectors, the Anatsui market offers something increasingly rare in contemporary art: a genuine long-hold proposition. His output of major works is limited by the labour-intensive production process — a single large installation can require up to 200 assistants working under Anatsui’s direction in his Nsukka studio, stitching together millions of bottle caps. Works are difficult to store, expensive to ship, and require knowledgeable installation teams. These logistical barriers function as natural market regulators, keeping supply constrained and ensuring that ownership is concentrated among institutions and long-term collectors rather than flippers.

The broader African art market context reinforces this position. According to ArtTactic’s Modern and Contemporary African Artist Market Report, the African segment of the global art market experienced only an 8.4% decline in 2023, compared to nearly 18% for the broader market. Anatsui, along with Julie Mehretu and Marlene Dumas, is consistently cited as a top seller in the sector. The emergence of dedicated African art fairs — particularly 1-54 in London, New York, Marrakech, and Paris — and the growth of gallery infrastructure in Lagos, Accra, Nairobi, and Cape Town has created a more robust primary market ecosystem that feeds institutional collecting pipelines.

Go Back and Pick: The Return to Wood

In 2025, while the art world continued to celebrate Anatsui’s metal tapestries, the artist made a significant conceptual move: he went back to wood. The twin exhibition “Go Back and Pick,” staged simultaneously at October Gallery and Goodman Gallery in London, presented a new series of wall-mounted wooden sculptures that evolved from the planar reliefs that characterised his practice in the 1980s and 1990s, before the bottle-cap works eclipsed everything else.

The title itself is a provocation. “Go back and pick” is the English translation of Sankofa, the Akan concept — often represented by a bird looking backward while its feet face forward — that holds that there is nothing wrong with returning to retrieve what was left behind. In Anatsui’s case, what was left behind was an entire body of work in tropical hardwood: burnt, incised, carved, and painted surfaces that engage with the materiality of the African landscape and the symbolic languages — Adinkra, uli, Nsibidi — that precede colonial inscription.

These new wooden works are not nostalgic. Pieces like 

Fractured World Order

 (2025) and 

Searching for Jacob’s Ladder

 (2025) bring the conceptual ambition of the metal works — the interest in global systems, historical layering, and the tension between surface and depth — into a material that carries entirely different connotations. Where the bottle caps speak of industrial modernity, commodity exchange, and the colonial trade in spirits, the wood speaks of slower time: the growth of forests, the traditions of carving, the weight of the land itself. The juxtaposition, across the two gallery spaces, created a dialogue between Anatsui’s two primary registers — one glittering and global, the other tactile and rooted.

The exhibitions were timed to coincide with Anatsui’s major presence in Tate Modern’s 

Nigerian Modernism

 exhibition, which opened in October 2025 — itself a landmark show featuring over 50 artists and positioning Nigerian art not as an appendix to Western modernism but as a parallel, autonomous tradition. Anatsui’s inclusion in that narrative — as both an inheritor of the Nsukka group’s innovations and a figure whose international success has opened doors for younger Nigerian artists — demonstrates the way his practice bridges the historical and the contemporary, the local and the global.

XOHANAMI: Opera, Spectacle, and the Non-Fixed Form

For the 2025–26 season, Anatsui designed XOHANAMI, the safety curtain commission for the Vienna State Opera, produced through the ongoing programme by museum in progress. The safety curtain — a fire-resistant barrier required in European theatres, which descends before each performance and during intervals — has been used since 1998 as a canvas for contemporary artists, with previous commissions by Tacita Dean, David Hockney, and Jeff Koons. Anatsui’s design brings his visual language into a context of concentrated public attention — the moment before the performance begins, when the audience is settled and the curtain fills the entire field of vision.

The commission is significant for several reasons. It places an African artist’s work at the centre of one of Europe’s most venerable cultural institutions — the Vienna Opera, a temple of the Western classical canon. It extends Anatsui’s practice of site-responsive work into a new context, one defined by temporality (the curtain is only visible at specific moments) and spectatorship (the audience is captive and attentive). And it continues the trajectory that has seen Anatsui’s work move from gallery walls to building facades (the Royal Academy in 2013), through public institutions (the Turbine Hall), and now into the performing arts — a progressive expansion of the contexts in which his visual language operates.

The Nsukka Studio as Counter-Institution

One of the most underreported aspects of Anatsui’s practice is the economic and social structure of his studio. Based in Nsukka, Nigeria, the studio employs up to 200 local assistants — whom Anatsui refers to as “artists” — to produce the bottle-cap works. Each person flattens, folds, and stitches caps by hand, contributing to installations that can comprise over two million individual pieces. This is not a factory; it is closer to a workshop tradition, in which skilled labour is acknowledged and the distinction between artist and fabricator is deliberately blurred.

The scale of this operation makes Anatsui’s studio one of the most significant sources of arts-sector employment in southeastern Nigeria. In a region where formal employment opportunities for young people are limited, the studio offers regular income, skill development, and participation in a project of international cultural significance. When Behind the Red Moon shipped from Nsukka to London in separate sheets, it carried with it not just the artist’s vision but the labour of a community — a fact that Tate’s exhibition guide was careful to acknowledge.

At ICOM Dubai 2025, where Anatsui delivered the keynote to over 4,500 museum professionals, he argued that museums should function as “living spaces, connecting the past, present, and future” and should be “modest, cheaper to organise, and accessible and attractive to ordinary people.” He also addressed restitution directly, stating that “Nations want their stolen artefacts and artworks returned, and the autonomy to decide how to restore them to their living cultures and contexts.” Coming from an artist whose work is held by precisely the institutions implicated in these debates, the statement carried particular weight.

What Anatsui Teaches the Market

For collectors and cultural practitioners navigating the African contemporary art landscape, Anatsui’s trajectory offers several key lessons that cut against prevailing market assumptions.

First, material innovation is not a gimmick — it is a worldview. Anatsui’s bottle-cap works are frequently described in terms of their visual spectacle, but their lasting significance lies in the argument they make about what materials contain. The caps are not found objects in the Duchampian sense; they are historical artefacts, carrying colonial trade histories in their very substance. This depth of material meaning is what separates enduring art from trend-driven production, and it is the quality that serious institutions collect for.

Second, the non-fixed form challenges the assumptions of both the market and the museum. When a work changes with every installation, it resists the commodity logic that requires art to be a stable, verifiable asset. It also challenges curatorial authority, since the artist’s instruction is that no installation should replicate a previous one. For collectors, this means owning an Anatsui is less like owning a painting and more like holding a score that can be performed differently each time — a proposition that requires a different kind of engagement and a different understanding of value.

Third, longevity matters more than velocity. Anatsui’s five-decade career, his evolution through multiple materials and scales, and his refusal to be reduced to a single signature style demonstrate the kind of sustained artistic development that institutions build collections around. In a market that frequently overvalues novelty and early-career hype, Anatsui is a reminder that the most durable reputations are built slowly, through decades of experimentation and deepening engagement.

Fourth, geography is not destiny but it is context. Anatsui’s choice to remain based in Nsukka rather than relocating to New York or London is not merely a biographical detail — it is a structural decision that shapes his materials (locally sourced caps), his labour force (locally employed assistants), and his conceptual frame (rooted in West African material culture while engaging with global systems). As the art world’s centre of gravity shifts toward a more genuinely polycentric model, artists who maintain deep local roots while operating globally are increasingly positioned as the standard rather than the exception.

The Weaver’s Son and the World’s Museums

There is a particular resonance in the fact that El Anatsui, the son of a Kente weaver from Ghana’s Volta Region, now has work hanging in the institutions that once collected Kente cloth as ethnographic specimens. The trajectory from ethnographic object to contemporary masterpiece — from the vitrine to the Turbine Hall — maps a profound shift in who holds the authority to define what counts as art, who makes it, and what it is allowed to mean.

Anatsui has navigated this shift with a combination of strategic patience and quiet radicalism. He did not campaign for inclusion in Western institutions; he simply made work so compelling that exclusion became untenable. He did not abandon his materials or his studio in Nigeria; he demonstrated that the most powerful art could emerge from the most overlooked places and the most discarded things. He did not provide neat narratives of uplift or redemption; he offered something more unsettling — the spectacle of colonial waste refashioned into objects of breathtaking beauty that refuse to let the viewer forget where the raw material came from.

At 81, with his return to wood running in parallel with his continued metal work, with the Vienna Opera commission opening new audiences to his practice, and with Tate Modern’s Nigerian Modernism show placing his career within the broader arc of a national artistic tradition, Anatsui occupies a position that transcends any single market category. He is simultaneously a living master of African sculpture, a key figure in the global history of installation art, and an ongoing provocation to the institutions that celebrate him — a reminder, stitched into every shimmering surface, that the beauty they display was made from the detritus of the systems they once profited from.

For MoMAA’s readers — collectors, curators, and cultural practitioners invested in the African art landscape — the Anatsui lesson is both aesthetic and ethical. The materials we overlook carry the deepest histories. The forms we think we understand are never truly fixed. And the most transformative art does not transcend its origins but makes them, at last, impossible to ignore.

FAQ

1. What is El Anatsui’s auction record?

El Anatsui’s current auction record is $2.3 million (approximately $2,228,000), set in May 2023 when Prophet (2012), a bottle-cap and copper wire sculpture, sold at Christie’s 21st Century Evening Sale in New York. The result exceeded the estimate by 123% and surpassed his previous record of $1.95 million for New Layout (2009) at Christie’s in 2021. His auction results overall range from $5,000 for smaller prints to the $2.3 million high for major bottle-cap installations.

2. What is “Behind the Red Moon” at Tate Modern?

Behind the Red Moon was El Anatsui’s monumental commission for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall (October 2023 – April 2024), part of the annual Hyundai Commission series. It was Anatsui’s largest-ever indoor installation and the first by an African artist in the Turbine Hall’s history. Staged in three acts — The Red Moon, The World, and The Wall — the work used thousands of stitched liquor bottle caps to address the transatlantic slave trade, colonial trade routes, and the founding history of the Tate institution itself. The exhibition later travelled to Museum of Art Pudong in Shanghai.

3. What materials does El Anatsui use and why?

Anatsui is best known for monumental wall sculptures assembled from thousands of flattened aluminium liquor bottle caps stitched together with copper wire. The caps are sourced from distilleries in Nigeria and Ghana, and their brand logos trace colonial and post-colonial trade routes — spirits were among the primary commodities exchanged during the transatlantic slave trade. Anatsui describes his process as transformation rather than recycling, giving discarded objects new lives. He also works extensively in burnt and incised tropical hardwood, ceramics, and mixed media, having recently returned to wood for his 2025 “Go Back and Pick” exhibition.

4. What is “Go Back and Pick” and why is it significant?

“Go Back and Pick” is a 2025 twin exhibition held simultaneously at October Gallery and Goodman Gallery in London, presenting new wall-mounted wooden sculptures by El Anatsui. The title references the Akan concept of Sankofa — returning to retrieve what was left behind. The show marks Anatsui’s return to wood, his primary medium from the 1980s and 1990s before his bottle-cap works gained international fame. New pieces like Fractured World Order and Searching for Jacob’s Ladder bring the conceptual depth of his metal installations into a material rooted in African landscape and carving traditions.

5. Where can I see El Anatsui’s work in 2025–2026?

Major current and upcoming exhibitions include: the “Nigerian Modernism” group exhibition at Tate Modern, London (opened October 2025); XOHANAMI, his safety curtain design for the Vienna State Opera (2025–26 season); After the Red Moon at Museum of Art Pudong, Shanghai (2024–25); and recent presentations at Patio Gallery, Kanaal, Belgium and Louvre Abu Dhabi. Anatsui is represented by October Gallery (London), Goodman Gallery (Johannesburg, Cape Town, London, New York), and Efie Gallery (Dubai).

6. How does El Anatsui’s Nsukka studio work?

Anatsui’s studio in Nsukka, southeastern Nigeria, employs up to 200 local assistants — whom Anatsui refers to as “artists” — to produce his bottle-cap installations. Each person hand-flattens, folds, and stitches caps with copper wire, contributing to works that can comprise over two million individual pieces. A single major installation can weigh over a ton. The studio functions as one of the most significant sources of arts-sector employment in the region, operating closer to a traditional workshop model than a conventional artist’s studio, with skilled labour acknowledged as integral to the creative process.

KEY EXHIBITIONS & COMMISSIONS (2023–2026)

Behind the Red Moon — Hyundai Commission, Tate Modern Turbine Hall, London. October 2023–April 2024. Travelled to Museum of Art Pudong, Shanghai, 2024–25.

XOHANAMI — Safety Curtain, Vienna State Opera. 2025–26 season.

Go Back and Pick — October Gallery & Goodman Gallery, London. 2025. Return to wood sculptures.

Nigerian Modernism — Tate Modern, London. October 2025–ongoing. Major group exhibition featuring Anatsui.

ICOM Dubai 2025 — Keynote speaker, 27th General Conference of the International Council of Museums, November 2025.