Four headless figures -- a man, a woman, and two children -- stand at attention as if in a drawing room, perhaps: they're hard to situate. Their clothes' colorful fabric clashes violently with a laced-up style. In "Nuclear Family" (1999), Yinka...
[more]Four headless figures -- a man, a woman, and two children -- stand at attention as if in a drawing room, perhaps: they're hard to situate. Their clothes' colorful fabric clashes violently with a laced-up style. In "Nuclear Family" (1999), Yinka Shonibare has fashioned African batik prints into the Victorian garb of Africa's colonizers.
Shonibare makes a practice of interweaving cultures that are at odds with one another, just as history has done. Because we're used to keeping the societies of colonizer and colonized distinct and distant from one another, their vibrant integration here evokes a visceral response. Shonibare brings the hidden connections between Europe and its one-time colonies into broad and garish relief.
Born in London and raised in Nigeria, Shonibare later returned to the United Kingdom. Defiant, sparking questions about national identity in an epoch of globalization, Shonibare's art juggles the dualities of his own life. In a self-portrait from the photo series 'Effnick' (1996), he is seated against red drapery, a globe of the world in front of him. He looks regal -- like any portrait of a nineteenth century European explorer. But, again, color -- this time his own chocolate-brown -- warps the complacent picture of colonizer and colonized we've spent centuries constructing.
In "Alien Obsessives; Mum, Dad, and the Kids" (1998), he attacks the issue of identity once again -- now using cute, bug-eyed aliens we recognize from cartoons. Covered in batik, these puppets, though, slyly question the nature of the term, 'alien.' Which differences really exist between us, and which are the projections of our own fantasies and fears? As Shonibare's work evolves, he presses at these issues in ever more inventive ways. Honored with a place in the 'Sensation' exhibition, he has proven he knows how to shock eye and mind.
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