Yinka Shonibare, a British-Nigerian artist, creates work playing with post- colonial structures and aesthetics. Born in England but being raised in Lagos, he developed a strong visual understanding of the relationship between a post colonized Africa and England. He lived in Nigeria from the time he was three up until he was seventeen. He moved back to London to attend art school at seventeen and when he was eighteen he contracted a virus which paralyzed half his body, he dropped out of art school to relearn how to live on his own and then went right back.
Shonibare’s work lives in a fabricated reality. He combines saturated, vibrant wax fabrics in order to create visual puns and criticize the past colonizers of Africa.
Because of his disability, his role as an artist working with concept is redefined. He plans his pieces, much like an architect would plan a large building, and has a team of professional costumers and artists assistants help him execute the work.
His work spans many mediums such as painting, sculpture, photography, and film. The work takes from classic books of Western literature and works of Rococo art, a hyper-adorned 19th century art movement.
Really, Yinka seems to be entranced by complexity and fictitious culture. Belonging to two distinct but interrelated cultures like the cultures of Lagos and London confirms for him the fiction in culture; seeing the behaviors of people in both these cities and recognizing common and idiosyncratic beliefs in their inhabitants has led him to belief that culture is just the result of a long and complicated story of violence and indulgence. His art reflects these ideas, and in that way we understand how his history, as well as ours, can be represented by a collision of inter cultural and historical imagery.
With his art, Shonibare adresses what it means to belong to two distinct but interrelated cultures, what it means to be black and making work labeled as "African Art" in London and in the art world, and how to work in the conceptual art industry as a disabled artist. Shonibare's work overlaps images from classical western literarure and imagery from African clothing to produce art that defines him distinctly as a Nigerian-English artist. His practice of actualizing his work through assistants rather than by his personal hand adds a new layer to the term "conceptual art" when applied to him. It is even more "conceptual", and allows disabled but extremely talented artists to participate and reach fame in the contemporary art industry.
I enjoyed Shonibare's art, it invokes scenes from fiction and real life alike, further perpetuating Shonibare's assertion that culture is a fiction, and that invisible cultural and racial boundaries can be surpassed. He never stops ridiculing the thought process of a 17th, 18th, and 19th century Western Europe which colonized Africa, but he entertains the idea of cultural exchange going both ways. The African wax fabrics were originally made by the Dutch and sold to Africans in Dutch colonies, so their presence in his art hints at a two way extraction of culture.
I am also obsessed with the overlapping and connection of imagery from separate cultures which show a seemingly fantastical but true connection between the two. Since I am interested in tracing history and finding reasons for the way culture in a certain region functions, I was fascinated by Shonibare's creative and historical problem solving skills.
