Yinka Shonibare (Artist research)
Artist research:
Name: Yinka Shonibare
Where are they from and where are they now:
born 1962), is a British-Nigerian artist living in the United Kingdom. His work explores cultural identity, colonialism and post-colonialism within the contemporary context of globalisation. A hallmark of his art is the brightly coloured Dutch wax fabric he uses.
Yinka Shonibare was born in London in 1962. When he was three years old, his family moved to Lagos, Nigeria, where his father practised law. At 17, he returned to Britain
in 2005—somewhat ironically, considering his exploration of colonialism and empire—he was appointed MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire); thereafter he presented himself professionally as “Yinka Shonibare MBE.”
Artwork (for each relevant piece):
Name of work: All work – looking at a common theme
What is it, and what is it made of:
A key material in Shonibare's work since 1994 is the brightly coloured "African" fabric (Dutch wax-printed cotton) that he buys himself from Brixton market in London. "But actually, the fabrics are not really authentically African the way people think," says Shonibare. "They prove to have a crossbred cultural background quite of their own. And it’s the fallacy of that signification that I like. It’s the way I view culture – it’s an artificial construct." Shonibare claims that the fabrics were first manufactured in Europe to sell in Indonesian markets and then they were sold in Africa, when they were rejected in Indonesia
He has these fabrics made up into European 18th-century dresses, covering sculptures of alien figures or stretched onto canvases and thickly painted over.
known for his examination of such ideas as authenticity, identity, colonialism, and power relations in often-ironic drawings, paintings, sculptures, photographs, films, and installations.
Image:
'Mrs Pinckney and the Emancipated Birds of South Carolina' 2017
Un Ballo in Maschera (A Masked Ball), 2004, color digital video, 32-minute loop. Images courtesy of the artist, James Cohan Gallery, New York, and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London.
Big Boy, 2002, wax printed cotton fabric and fiberglass, dimensions variable.
Yinka Shonibare, MBE, Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle, Fourth Plinth Commission at Trafalgar Square. Courtesy QuentinUK/WikiCommons
What does it mean/represent:
Shonibare’s practice that reflect a similar investment in diverse media and British maritime history. Bringing together photography, costume, sculpture, and film, the Center’s display introduces audiences to the breadth of Shonibare’s work,
British-born Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare MBE (b. 1962) works across diverse artistic media to explore ideas about African contemporary identity and the legacy of European colonialism in the present. Shonibare's art considers social class and aesthetics, and is characterized by recurring visual symbols such as "Dutch wax" fabric since the mid-1990s. This exhibition presents 14 years of the artist's career, encompassing painting, sculpture, large-scale mixed-media installations, photography and film.
Dutch wax fabric is rich with meaning for the artist. Inspired by Indonesian batiks and produced in Europe for the West African market in the 19th and early 20th centuries, it has come to symbolize for Shonibare the complex web of economic and racial interactions--and interdependencies--between Europe, Asia and Africa.
Yinka Shonibare first came to widespread attention through his use of Dutch wax fabric, which he has used both as the ground of his paintings and to clothe his sculptures. This bright and distinctive fabric was originally produced in Dutch Indonesia, where no market was found for it, and subsequently copied and produced by the English, who eventually sold it to West Africans, for whom it became a popular everyday item of clothing. It also, crucially, became a sign of identitarian “authenticity” both in Africa and, later, for Africans in England. A colonial invention, Dutch wax fabric offers itself as both a fake and yet “authentic” sign of Africanness, and Shonibare’s use of it in his paintings and sculptures accentuates a politics of (in)authenticity by simultaneously presenting both the ideal of an “authentic” identity and identity as a “fabrication.”
black artist who continuously challenges assumptions and stereotypes — “That’s the point of my work really,” he said
Additionally, because Mr. Shonibare does not like his figures to be racially identifiable, chopping off their heads helps. (The fiberglass bodies are mixed race, “kind of coffee colored,” he said.)
His nuanced syntheses of significant moments in global and artistic histories reflect his own hybrid Nigerian/British identity.
Being British-born, growing up in Lagos and going on to study and live in London, it is clear that Yinka Shonibare’s work has been heavily influenced by his own past, exploring ideas of cross-cultural heritage and the creation of a hybrid identity. Influenced both by the aesthetics of Romanticism in Europe and African textiles, this interplay between historical European and African visuals further creates a complex dialogue around the politics of colonialism and post-colonialism.
Read simultaneously as a celebration and a condemnation of the past, Shonibare’s playful yet intricate work avoids didactic statements and never clearly states a position; as Shonibare says himself, ‘there’s no anger…so I can have fun with it’
“I think it’s more through personal motivation, coming from a mixed background and not wanting to define myself by one nationality. There are these binaries: Nigerian or British, and people seem quick to try and define things. There seems to be a tendency to try and make people choose, to come down on one side of these binaries. My work addresses the idea of having this fusion or hybrid cultural identity and what that produces.”
“Some people see my work as a celebration of the British colonial rule and some people see my work as a critique of it, and it’s not either. A lot of people saw Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle [the 1:30 scale model of Nelson’s HMS Victory, that sat on the Fourth Plinth from May 2010 to January 2012] as a celebration of Nelson’s campaign of colonization, but again, I was not necessarily making a definite statement either way. It’s about raising questions rather than answering them.”
“I can use these aesthetics without having to define my opinion on them”
Connection to culture:
Having described himself as a ‘post-colonial’ hybrid, Shonibare questions the meaning of cultural and national definitions.
Shonibare’s work explores issues of race and class through the media of painting, sculpture, photography and film. Shonibare questions the meaning of cultural and national definitions. His trademark material is the brightly coloured ‘African’ batik fabric he buys in London. This type of fabric was inspired by Indonesian design, mass-produced by the Dutch and eventually sold to the colonies in West Africa. In the 1960s the material became a new sign of African identity and independence.
Shonibare’s art was placed on its trajectory by the comments of one of his teachers, who asked him why he didn’t make “authentic African art.” As someone who had spoken Yoruba at home yet watched British and U.S. television, was perfectly fluent in English, and had lived in both England and urban Nigeria, the artist pondered the meaning of authenticity and the greater significance of his multicultural identity.
Connection to collonialism:
Shonibare’s work explores issues of colonialism alongside those of race and class,
He examines, in particular, the construction of identity and tangled interrelationship between Africa and Europe and their respective economic and political histories.
He then began using these textiles to create costumes in the Victorian style for mannequins. These brightly clothed mannequins sometimes were headless (Scramble for Africa, 2003) and sometimes had objects such as globes in place of human heads (Planets in My Head, Philosophy, 2011). In such works as Diary of a Victorian Dandy (1998; based on the narrative works of British artist William Hogarth),
Heading to an African fabric shop in South London, he discovered that the batik fabric so closely associated with Africa had not in fact originated there, but had been inspired by Javanese batiks brought over by Dutch and English traders; in fact, some of the "African" fabric he was looking at had actually been manufactured in the Netherlands. Fascinated by the irony of an African fabric that wasn’t purely African, but rather an example of globalization at its finest, Shonibare began using it—first as canvases and later in the construction of his costumes, whose 19th century design harkened back to British colonial days in Africa, adding yet another layer of complexity.
Critique/response to artwork:
One thing that becomes immediately apparent when you start to study this kind of stuff is just how much influence cultures have had on each other over thousands and thousands of years of contact. The kind of national borders you find on a map suddenly seem a little arbitrary, which raises some very interesting questions about cultural identity.
And so we were totally psyched to discover the artist Yinka Shonibare. Best known for his headless mannequins swathed in sumptuous Victorian costume, Shonibare has described his work as an attempt to deal with the construction of stereotypes—particularly that of the so-called "African identity."
Mr. Shonibare is not without his critics in England. The London Evening Standard, for instance, has called his focus on cultural identity “labored, repetitive and a little last decade.” But his work is consistently requested for exhibition and purchase by museums around the world, according to his dealers, and he is rarely without a significant show or commission.
Mr. Shonibare said, he found his artistic raison d’être. “I realized what I’d really have to deal with was the construction of stereotypes, and that’s what my work would be about.”
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yinka_Shonibare
http://www.yinkashonibarembe.com/biography/
http://www.yinkashonibarembe.com/articles/past/
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Yinka-Shonibare
http://britishart.yale.edu/exhibitions/yinka-shonibare-mbe-ra
https://africa.si.edu/exhibits/shonibare/intro.html
http://www.projectbly.com/blog/critique-by-batik
http://bombmagazine.org/article/2777/yinka-shonibare
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/21/arts/design/21sont.html
http://www.artcritical.com/2012/02/26/yinka-shonibare/
https://theculturetrip.com/africa/nigeria/articles/colonialism-and-cultural-hybridity-an-interview-with-yinka-shonibare-mbe/
What I have learnt:
Use a material that can be traced to what the art work is thinking about
Start it from a narrative
Could use masks – strongly associated with identity and can be used in cultural displays
“London is this big mix, and there are a lot of Nigerians in London; it has always felt like a home from home. I don’t think I’ve ever really had to categorize myself as one or the other.” Maybe I shouldn’t categorise myself
I can use the beads as long as I am not recreating a traditional item, nut the material is free to use
make it so the audience can benefit from it, make their own assumptions from it
