El Anatsui to create Tate Modern's 2023 Turbine Hall commission

El Anatsui will produce the annual large-scale installation for Tate Modern's Turbine Hall, opening on 10 October 2023 and running through 14 April 2024. The Ghanaian artist, who taught sculpture at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, gained international recognition at the 2007 Venice Biennale with Dusasa II, a monumental work woven from thousands of bottle tops that cascaded between pillars in the Arsenale. Critics have compared his metal tapestries to kente cloth, a traditional Ghanaian textile his father mastered. Anatsui received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 2015 Venice Biennale and won the Charles Wollaston Award at London's Royal Academy of Arts in 2013. His sculptures incorporate found materials like scrap metal, broken pottery, and chipped wood, with the artist noting his attraction to textiles stems from their fluidity and capacity for constant transformation. Recent solo exhibitions include presentations at La Conciergerie in Paris (2021), Haus der Kunst in Munich (2019), Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha (2019), and Kunstmuseum Bern (2020). His work forms part of permanent collections at institutions including The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, The British Museum in London, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Associated with the Nsukka group during the 1970s African craft revival, Anatsui has worked primarily in Nigeria throughout his career.