El Anatsui: Behind the Red Moon at Tate Modern review – wonder, awe and horror

When the Ghanaian artist El Anatsui looks at the horizontal expanse of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, he sees a ship. And as you walk in, he greets you with a vast sail, suspended from the ceiling, deep red in colour, shimmering in the light and caught mid-billow. It’s called The Red Moon. Amid the crimson, in glistering gold fragments, is a lunar circle, alluding to the blood moon produced in an eclipse.

Anatsui has fashioned this vast piece from his trademark material: metal bottle tops, mostly from alcoholic drinks, crushed and tied, with the help of numerous studio assistants, with copper wire into huge textiles. The lids have a complex social history, involving colonial trade routes including, of course, the slave trade — the sugar that fuels alcohol being produced on plantations by enslaved peoples. El Anatsui refers to Tate’s historic connection with the sugar industry in a text on the wall.

So immediately as you walk into the Turbine Hall, there’s a conflicting emotional landscape: wonder at this glorious, glistening object, awe at the feat of producing by hand this monumental hanging, and deep-seated horror at the sickening histories it evokes. By creating a blood-red sail, Anatsui inevitably makes the floor of the Turbine Hall a vast deck, implicating us in these histories, reminding us that their legacies are painfully alive.

A second work, The World, hangs near the bridge over the Turbine Hall. From one angle, it forms a globe, but from another it suggests bodily forms, perhaps drifting or floating. I thought of the bodies cramped in horrific conditions on ships, or lost at sea, in the Middle Passage, the network of routes between West Africa and North America which carried countless enslaved people from their homes to the New World; of the haunting that dominates histories and fictions reflecting on slavery.

That suspense between a pure, sensory enjoyment and troubling content pervades the installation. On the verso of the red sail is a yellow and gold patchwork that made me think of the luminous patchworks of Gustav Klimt. And a final hanging work, The Wall, dominated by black, at the furthest end of the space, crashes to the floor in spectacular, turbulent waves. For Anatsui, walls represent an ancient tale of resistance to oppression, relating to present-day Togo. And black evokes Africa and its diaspora, the symbolism of liberation and return.

On The Wall’s other side, we see the dazzling silver on the reverse of the black bottletops, with a loose net of yellow and red overlaying it, dense at the base, but gradually lightening to conjure the froth and spume of a wave hitting shore. Anatsui makes his humdrum material a fabric of poignant poetry.

Tate Modern, from October 10 to April 14; tate.org.uk