“Anything that has been used by humans has a history, so those properties help whatever I do to gain some meaning.”
A shimmering membrane crafted from repurposed bottle caps, El Anatsui’s Hesitant Rivers transforms the detritus of global commerce into a vision of resplendent beauty. Cascading across the wall like liquid metal, it shifts between sculpture, painting, and textile, dazzling the eye while summoning the histories embedded in its humble components. Anatsui’s practice has long focused on transforming everyday materials. In the 1970s, the artist worked with broken pottery and weathered timber, but it was a chance encounter in the late 1990s that fundamentally broadened his artistic direction. While walking through Nsukka, in southeastern Nigeria where he lived and taught for decades, Anatsui came across a bag of discarded liquor bottle tops. Back in his studio, he began experimenting by flattening, twisting, piercing, and wiring the caps together. Reflecting on this process, he later recalled: “When the process of stitching got underway, I discovered that the result resembled a real fabric cloth” (Susan Mullin Vogel, El Anatsui: Art and Life, p. 54). From this revelation, Hesitant Rivers exemplifies Anatsui’s singular ability to draw poetry from discarded fragments and to refashion material waste into an image of collects ive memory.
In Hesitant Rivers, rivulets of silver, gold, and red flow across the surface, evoking both the sinuous movement of waterways and the metaphorical currents of history. The title itself suggests arrested motion – flows of trade and migration diverted, obstructed, or forced into uneasy channels. The very materials that comprise the work carry this layered weight of history and meaning. Each bottle cap once sealed a vessel of liquor imported into West Africa, its presence a trace of colonial economies and global commerce, carried across the waterways of the Atlantic Ocean. Both cloth and alcohol were deeply entwined in the transatlantic trade of goods, gold, and enslaved people – core commodities in the brutal triangular exchange linking Africa, Europe, and the Americas. In Anatsui’s hands, these woven bottle caps become emblems of this long history of extraction and exchange – fragments of colonial commerce transfigured into luminous monuments of memory. The title Hesitant Rivers thus gains added significance: a reminder that water has always been the medium of circulation, carrying the tides of trade, empire, and displacement that continue to shape the modern world.
“The scope of meaning associated with cloth is so wide... cloth is to the African what monuments are to Westerners. Indeed, their capacity and application to commemorate events, issues, persons, and objectives outside of themselves are so immense and fluid it even rubs off on other practices.”
Works in Prestigious Museum collects ions
Although fundamentally different in construction, Anatsui’s metallic hangings recall cloth and tapestries, deepening the historical and cultural resonance of his work. For Anatsui, cloth functions both as a commodity and a symbol, reflecting the reach of colonial empires and the complex networks of global trade. Simultaneously, Hesitant Rivers draws deeply from West African traditions. Its stitched metallic surface echoes the structure of kente cloth – woven in narrow strips and historically reserved for royal and ceremonial use in Anatsui’s native Ghana. Anatsui’s modular construction strikingly parallels this technique: both rely on the repetition of small units to create expansive, dazzling compositions. The recurring reds, yellows, and blacks evoke not only kente’s rich symbolic language but also the Ghanaian flag, embedding a sense of national identity within a broader global narrative.
“I believe that artists are better off working with whatever their environment throws up. I think that’s what has been happening in Africa for a long t.mes , in fact not only in Africa but in the whole world, except that maybe in the West they have developed these ‘professional’ materials. But I don’t think that working with such prescribed materials would be very interested to me – industrially produced colours for painting."
Hesitant Rivers thus stands as a monument to the past by embodying collects ive memory, yet it does so in a form that is mutable and responsive rather than fixed. Each installation is unique, shaped by how the work is folded, draped, or suspended, highlighting Anatsui’s embrace of impermanence and transformation in his invention of what terms the "non-fixed form." These qualities serve as powerful metaphors for the shifting realities of postcolonial Africa and its evolving place in the world. Ultimately, the impact of the work lies in its striking duality: at once everyday and precious, abstract and historical, monumental and metamorphic. Its glittering surface entrances the viewer, but beneath that splendour lies a dense layering of histories: colonial trade, global capitalism, local craft, and cultural memory. It is both an object of beauty and a meditation on the entangled legacies of Africa and the wider world.
Today, El Anatsui is celebrated as one of the foremost artists of our t.mes , his practice redefining the very possibilities of contemporary sculpture. His works are held in the world’s most prestigious collects ions, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. He has also been the subject of groundbreaking public commissions, from his monumental 2024 takeover of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall to the newly unveiled Safety Curtain at the Vienna State Opera.