El Anatsui: Behind the Red Moon

The book will be lavishly illustrated with photos of this new sculpture, while also serving as an introduction to the artist’s life and work

El Anatsui’s Behind the Red Moon is a monumental sculptural installation made of thousands of metal bottle tops and fragments. Crumpling, crushing, and stitching them into different compositions, large panels are pieced together to form massive abstract fields of color, shape, and line. The work builds on Anatsui’s interest in histories of encounter and the migration of goods and people during the transatlantic slave trade. In these astonishing hangings, the past and present of Africa and Europe merge into sculptural forms that embody Anatsui’s idea of the “non-fixed form” and are part of his highly experimental approach to sculpture. “Each material has its properties, physical, and even spiritual,” he explains. Behind the Red Moon explores elemental forces interwoven with human histories of power, oppression, dispersion, and survival. In this book, contributions by art historians, artists, and writers illuminate these themes, and a conversation between the artist and curator Osei Bonsu casts light on the full range of Anatsui’s extraordinary work.

Osei Bonsu is Curator of International Art at Tate Modern, where he is responsible for organizing exhibitions, developing the museum’s collection and broadening the representation of artists from Africa and the African diaspora. In 2020, he was named as one of Apollo magazine’s 40 under 40 leading African voices.