Executed in 2017, Among Others is a rare, double-sided example of El Anatsui’s seminal corpus of metal mosaics which brought the Ghanaian artist to global recognition, cementing his position as one of the world's leading contemporary artists. On one side, Among Others is a textile-like object, employing colours and shapes one could find on Kente, the hand-woven ceremonial cloth of the Asante and Ewe people of Ghana. On the other, it is a remarkable tapestry, a reflection and historical record of the daily lives of Anatsui and his community. Wade in the Water, a comparable work executed between 2017-2021 and sold at Sotheby’s in March 2022, is another example of this subset of the artist’s oeuvre. Other examples of Anatsui’s metallic tapestries are held in important collections such as The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Broad, Los Angeles, The Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi; and Zeit Museum of Contemporary African in Cape town.

Anatsui’s choice of found materials includes caps from a spectrum of consumer goods, as well as pieces of aluminium roofing strips. Transforming simple, everyday materials from local surroundings into striking, large-scale installations, Anatsui invites the viewer to examine their preconceptions of waste, and its relationship to ‘beauty’, ‘fine’ art or ‘high’ culture. In the creation of these works, Anatsui hammers and folds bottle caps into various small shapes. He then fuses the sections of sewn bottle caps together. This process is laden with uncertainty and chance encounters; Anatsui usually begins a work without a vision for its final composition.

Unlike Anatsui’s monumental works, whose installation is often left in the care of exhibition curators resulting in compositional and sculptural idiosyncrasies, the present work is designed to simply hang flat upon a walled surface. Where the latter is gazed upon as a sculptural form, Anatsui’s hanging works invite the viewer to look both at and through the composition. Among Others is certainly a multi-dimensional work, its texture and lustre refuse to be perceived in one plane alone. Yet, in this work, Anatsui implements a near-figurative sense of design which suggests that it has been made not only to be seen as an object, but also as a representation. Hanging works like Among Others evoke dream-like landscapes, distant horizons and cartographic schematics. It is a credit to Anatsui that a slight variation in his artistic gesture opens new worlds of perception for the viewer.

Born in post World War II Ghana, Anatsui’s life began during an age of upheaval: the globalization of Africa, modernist development at the hands of the outgoing colonial governments, and mass political mobilisation in pursuit of constitutional independence. Anatsui’s bottle caps, at first seemingly abstract and apolitical, are better understood as historical relics, referencing the patterns of migration, displacement, and development which birthed countries like Ghana and Nigeria, and undermined their precolonial culture in the process. Through the use of such everyday objects, the artist breathes new life into these relics of a time past, referencing the connectivity between Africa and the Western world and the region’s complex colonial history.

Anatsui himself has said, “What I’m interested in is the fact of many hands. When people see work like that, they should be able to feel the presence of those people” (El Anatsui quoted in: Julian Lucas, “How El Anatsui Broke the Seal on Contemporary Art”, The New Yorker, 11 January 2021, online). The bottle caps often retain traces and fingerprints of the hands that twisted them off bottles in the first place and then discarded them, and indeed the hands of his studio assistants who assemble them into luminous, shimmering mosaics. Anatsui’s practice is thus centred around social activity in his community. Patterns of consumption, disposal, reutilisation, and labour gives form to his works, which, in turn, carry within them the memory of the human relations within his community.

Anatsui’s work courts universal acclaim for the myriad cultural and art historical references they invoke in the mind of the viewer. As writer and critic Julian Lucas puts it, “To formalists, he was an Abstract Expressionist who worked in aluminium refuse; to the postmodern and the post-colonially minded, a maverick interrogator of consumption and commerce; to Old Guard Africanists, a renewer of ancient craft traditions. To most, his work was simply beautiful, with transcendent aspirations rare in the self-reflexive context of contemporary art. As it turned out, the unfixed form wasn’t just a way of sculpting. It was the principle of a career that had opened itself to the world without sacrificing its integrity” (Julian Lucas, “How El Anatsui Broke the Seal on Contemporary Art”, The New Yorker, 11 January 2021, online).