The Colours of Colonialism: El Anatsui and the Afterlife of Empire
In the rippling metallic expanses of El Anatsui’s monumental installations, colour becomes a language of history. His vast sheets of crumpled bottle caps, stitched together with copper wire and hung like royal tapestries, catch the light and transform it into something both dazzling and disquieting. Gold, red, silver, black: a palette that glows with beauty yet is shadowed by pain. Each hue bears the weight of a story. Each glint reflects a colonial past still flickering beneath the surface of our consumer present.
Encountering El Anatsui’s work in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern was an overwhelming experience of scale, light, and colour. Vast metallic drapery cascaded down the industrial walls like a living skin, shifting from gold to rust to silver as you move. In that chromatic shimmer, colour becomes more than surface; it becomes a methodology, a way of thinking about globalisation itself, how materials, trade, labour, and histories of contact move, transform, and reappear in altered forms. Each hue carried a geography, a memory, a transaction, reminding us that colour is not just what we see, but what connects us across the distances of empire and economy.
Hyundai Commission: El Anatsui: Behind the Red Moon, Installation View, Photo ©Tate (Joe Humphrys)
El Anatsui has spent decades collecting the detritus of global trade: aluminium seals from liquor bottles, foil from discarded packaging, fragments of consumption’s endless churn. These humble, flattened materials, sourced from distilleries near his studio in Nsukka, Nigeria, are woven into monumental metal cloths that shimmer with the opulence of royal regalia. From a distance, they resemble woven silk, the kind worn by kings or spread across ancestral shrines. But up close, the illusion breaks. The “fabric” is sharp, industrial, stamped with logos, and saturated with the colours of commercial desire. It is beauty fashioned from what the world has thrown away.
The colours in Anatsui’s work are not passive or decorative; they are active participants in a narrative of power. The gleaming golds recall not only wealth and prestige but also the colonial hunger for Africa’s resources; its gold, its land, its people. The deep reds suggest vitality and celebration, but also the violence of empire, the spilling of blood in the name of trade. The silvers and chromes speak of modernity and mechanisation, the polished face of progress that conceals the grime of extraction. Even black, the space between the shimmer, feels alive and dense with memory. It is the colour of what cannot be seen: the invisible histories of labour, the unrecorded hands that once picked, carried, smelted, brewed, or bottled.
To look at Anatsui’s work is to experience colour as a form of time travel. The bottle caps he uses were once part of a global network of consumption, carrying imported liquors into African markets—echoes of the colonial triangle of rum, sugar, and human lives that defined earlier centuries. Each fragment bears the residue of a brand, a marketing decision, a geography of desire. By gathering and reassembling these fragments, Anatsui transforms them into a surface that both seduces and unsettles. What was once waste becomes treasure; what was once uniform and corporate becomes irregular, handmade, and human. Colour becomes a form of reclamation.
There is an irony, and a kind of genius, in how Anatsui turns the visual codes of consumer capitalism against themselves. These bottle caps were designed to be ephemeral: to seal, to be used, to be discarded. They are printed in bright colours to attract the eye and promise pleasure. Anatsui reclaims that same seductive colour and stretches it across the walls of museums, transforming it from marketing into meaning. In doing so, he exposes the logic of consumption itself: how beauty and desire are manufactured to conceal systems of exploitation and waste.
Colour, for Anatsui, is never pure. It is the residue of exchange, a record of contact and collision. His work echoes the textiles of West African tradition, particularly the luminous kente cloths of Ghana, woven from strips of colour and loaded with symbolic meaning. Yet Anatsui’s metallic weavings do not imitate; they mutate. The shimmering fields of aluminium mimic kente’s rhythmic geometry but replace thread with metal, local pigment with industrial dye. They are, in a sense, postcolonial textiles woven not from the resources of the land but from the debris of a global economy that has replaced agriculture with import, craft with commodity.
Energy Spill by El Anatsui, 2010 via Wikimedia Commons
In this way, Anatsui’s colours are paradoxical. They evoke continuity while revealing rupture. They recall the richness of precolonial African artistry while confronting the contemporary viewer with the afterlife of empire. When the light hits the folds of his sculptures, the metal seems to breathe, an undulating surface that refuses to stay still. It is as if history itself were moving, shimmering, refusing to be fixed.
What makes these works so arresting is their ability to hold beauty and critique in the same gesture. Anatsui’s colours invite admiration; museum visitors gasp, cameras flash, but the more one looks, the more uneasy that admiration becomes. Beauty is inseparable from what it conceals, the economies of desire that fuel consumption and the exploitations that underlie global trade. His art is not simply about recycling materials; it is about recycling meanings. The discarded becomes sacred. The waste becomes woven. The colours of capitalism are reconfigured into the colours of resistance.
Anatsui’s use of colour is also deeply material. The bottle caps are not painted; their hues are printed, manufactured, already coded by industry. He does not add pigment but rearranges it. His palette is inherited, found, accidental, dictated by the world’s waste. This act of reorganising colour is itself a commentary on power. It suggests that the artist, like the postcolonial subject, must work within the systems he has inherited, transforming their remnants into something new. Composition becomes an act of survival.
There is something profoundly poetic in how Anatsui leaves the installation of his works open-ended. His pieces can be hung differently each time, draped like cloth, spread like maps, gathered like clouds. Colour, in this context, becomes fluid, mutable, dependent on light and angle. A single work can shift from bronze to crimson to shadow with a turn of the head. In this mutability lies a quiet defiance of the fixity imposed by colonial taxonomies, systems that sought to categorise, label, and contain. Anatsui’s colours refuse containment. They change. They live.
In a world increasingly defined by overproduction and waste, Anatsui’s practice feels both prophetic and redemptive. He does not moralise; he materialises. The transformation of trash into splendour is not a metaphor but a method, a way of re-seeing value. Colour becomes the bridge between destruction and renewal. What was once a sign of consumption becomes a sign of creativity. In this transformation, Anatsui stages a subtle but powerful revolution, turning the vocabulary of colonial extraction (metal, trade, brand, bottle) into a grammar of beauty.
His tapestries are, ultimately, mirrors. They reflect not only light but us: the consumers, the admirers, the participants in systems that still echo with colonial rhythms. Their beauty seduces, then implicates. The colours we adore are the colours of power, but also of possibility. In their shimmer we glimpse both the violence of history and the hope of transformation.
To stand before an El Anatsui is to feel colour as history is made visible. Gold is never just gold; red is never just red. Each hue is a record, a residue, a question. What do we value? What do we discard? What might we recover if we learned to see differently? In the end, Anatsui reminds us that colour, like power, can never be neutral. It can wound, it can dazzle, but in the right hands, it can also heal.
Images
https://www.tate.org.uk/press/press-releases/hyundai-commission-el-anatsui-behind-the-red-moon
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:El_anatsui,_energy_spill,_2010_(coll._priv.)_01.jpg
Cover Image
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sheets_(2611156372).jpg
