Introducing Yinka Shonibare CBE
Yinka Shonibare CBE is a British artist of Nigerian extraction. He works in both London and Lagos.
He was born in London in 1962.
In 2013 he was elected to the Royal Academy.
In 2019 he was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE). One of the most interesting things in the exhibition is the fact that Shonibare has made ‘CBE’ part of his name. To quote the curators:
The artist includes CBE as part of his professional name as a gesture towards his complex relationship to British honours and the systems they represent.
In 2021 Shonibare co-curated the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.
In 2004, he was nominated for the Turner Prize. In 2008 and in 2010, his first public art commission, Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle, was displayed on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square.
The Tetley commissioned Shonibare’s Hibiscus Rising, a major public memorial in Leeds for David Oluwale, which opened in November 2023.
His work has been bought by collections around the world including Tate and V&A in London, the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institute, Washington and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Some Shonibare pieces were until recently on display in the Royal Academy’s Entangled Pasts exhibition.
Installation view of ‘Woman Moving Up’ by Yinka Shonibare at the Royal Academy’s ‘Entangled Pasts’ exhibition (2023). Note 1) the human figure 2) the West African patterned fabric. Courtesy the artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York. Photo © Royal Academy of Arts, London / David Parry © Yinka Shonibare CBE RA
The Shonibare work that I’m familiar with is characterised by 1) life-size human figures, sometimes looking like mannequins, sometimes like statues and 2) bright and vibrant colours used in decorative styles.
Suspended States
This is is Shonibare’s first solo exhibition in London for over 20 years and features two new large-scale installations: Sanctuary City and War Library. The Serpentine South Gallery has been divided into four distinct rooms or spaces for the show.
1) In the foyer or first room is ‘Wind Sculpture in Bronze IV’. Then come 2) ‘The War Library’ 3) ‘Sanctuary City’ and 4) ‘Decolonised Structures’. Off to one side is a room detailing Shonibare’s extraordinarily prolific work with art charities and groups he’s set up or hosts, either in London or Nigeria, but this is more part of his biography and career than art as such. It contains a packed timeline and an interesting video but no art works. Also gathered in the first few spaces are half a dozen works from his quilt series about African birds and cowboys angels. So to take them in order:
Wind Sculpture in Bronze IV
Straightaway the visitor is introduced to Shonibare’s swirling forms and colourful designs. Wind Sculpture in Bronze IV captures a giant billowing cloth, hand-painted in turquoise, yellow and orange Dutch wax pattern.
Installation view of showing ‘Wind Sculpture in Bronze IV’ in ‘Suspended States’ 2024 by Yinka Shonibare CBE at Serpentine South (photo by the author)
The wall label gives us some interesting cultural history which is that, back in imperial times, Dutch traders copied colours and designs from batik work in their colonies in the Dutch East Indies (what is now Indonesia). They adapted the patterns for mass production and sold them in West Africa. Here they became very popular and copied by local craftsmen and manufacturers who produced their own versions for sale within the British economic sphere. Slowly these colours and patterns became associated in the Anglosphere with West Africa, as they are today. But their true history reveals the complex cultural and economic entanglements of a globalised world.
(PS: A similar work, Material (SG) IV, has just been installed in the gardens of Dulwich Picture Gallery in South London.)
Three sets of quilts
1. The African Bird Magic quilt series
Large quilts of bold design and bright colours featuring realistic portrayals of endangered birds such as the Sokoke Scops Owl, Mauritius Fody and Comoro Blue Vanga into which are inserted traditional African tribal masks.
Installation view of ‘Suspended States’ 2024 by Yinka Shonibare CBE at Serpentine South showing two of the ‘The African Bird Magic’ quilt series © Yinka Shonibare CBE 2024. Photo © Jo Underhill. Courtesy Yinka Shonibare CBE and Serpentine
I liked these because I like, and value, birds. I have birdfeeders in my garden and plant insect-friendly flowers to encourage the insects the birds eat. And anyone who knows 20th century western art has been groomed to like African masks from their inclusion in so much Modernist art.
Apparently these pieces are intended to:
explore the degradation of the African environment through colonial industrialisation and its disastrous effects on ecology
But I didn’t get that one little bit from the actual works, which are pretty and decorative.
2. Creatures of the mappa mundi
Same kind of treatment, different subject. Large framed quilts depicting mythical creatures sourced from illustrations found in the largest surviving medieval map, Hereford Cathedral’s Mappa Mundi (late 13th and early 14th century). This one depicts the Bonnacon, a bull-like creature known for defending itself with caustic excrement.
The Bonnacon from ‘Creatures of the Mappa Mundi’ (2018) by Yinka Shonibare CBE. Commissioned by Meadow Arts. Courtesy Yinka Shonibare CBE and Goodman Gallery, Cape Town, Johannesburg, London and New York; James Cohan Gallery, New York; and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London and New York. Photo © Stephen White & Co.
I like medieval art and am a big fan of Northern renaissance art, but I wasn’t particularly taken with these. They seemed clumsy next to the delicacy and care of the originals.
Again, these pieces suffer from what you could call ‘over explanation’, as Shonibare claims that they reference ‘the history of xenophobia in European history and the resulting extinction of species’.
‘The map reflects our contemporary concerns of fear of the stranger or “other” which often leads to xenophobia. The depictions of extinct creatures of legend are a reminder that we may yet become extinct if we do not take care of our environment.’
If you say so, but none of that is visible in the actual work. This heavy freight of meaning has been projected onto it.
3. The Cowboy Angels woodcut series
The Cowboy Angels woodcut series depicts cowboy tropes from the American West with the text ‘Angel’ hovering above. Each cowboy is portrayed with angel wings and an African mask superimposed over their face. The subject matter is obviously messing with the idea of ‘the cowboy’ but are also interesting technical experiments with the woodcut print medium. Shonibare creates cuts in the printed paper to reveal Dutch wax printed cotton and collages each work with Financial Times newspaper as a commentary on economic dynamics connecting countries and ‘to signify power relations.’
He made the series in 2017 partly in response to the election of Donald Trump. I wonder what he’ll do if Trump gets re-elected this year.
Installation view of ‘Suspended States’ 2024 by Yinka Shonibare CBE at Serpentine South showing one of the Cowboy Angel woodprints © Yinka Shonibare CBE 2024. Courtesy Yinka Shonibare CBE and Serpentine
This sounds like a great idea but I didn’t actually like the works which lacked something, some kind of inspirational zing.
These quilts and prints are all in alcoves or side rooms. The three main exhibition rooms are devoted to three large installations. These are (in order):
1. The War Library
Two walls of a big white gallery are entirely given over to floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, which are packed, unsurprisingly, with books. The immediately noticeable aspect of these is that a) they are all different sizes b) from what you can see of the spines, they are all decorated with Shonibare’s trademark colourful patterns and c) the title of each one is given in gleaming gold lettering.
Installation view of ‘Suspended States 2024’ by Yinka Shonibare CBE at Serpentine South, showing ‘The War Library’ © Yinka Shonibare CBE 2024 (photo by the author)
The exhibition guide booklet which you pick up at the start of the show gives more detail, telling us there are 5,270 books bound in Dutch wax print cotton and that along the spines of 2,700 books is gold lettering naming conflicts and peace treaties. Some of the books are left without lettering, indicating events that are yet to take place.
On the white table are a couple of computer monitors and keyboards where visitors are meant to access further information created by the extensive research conducted by a team of 10 specialists which informed The War Library. When I visited both monitors were being used by toddlers who, given full access to the internet, were playing video games.
All galleries have security people in every room. In big old institutions like the National Gallery these are little more than security guards to protect the pictures. In somewhere like the Serpentine these ‘gallery hosts’ are often young, well educated, sometimes art students or budding artists themselves. I always ask them what they think, since they have inside knowledge of exhibitions and their views are younger and more au courant than mine.
In this way I discovered, to my surprise, that the young women gallery hosts at the Judy Chicago exhibition up the road at Serpentine North thought that Chicago was now a corporate brand, an international business whose second-wave feminism had little or no relevance to women today. And at the Shonibare, I ended up having quite long conversations with no fewer than three of the hosts who shared their views and also the kind of things visitors asked them.
Turns out that quite a few visitors to this room asked the host whether this was an actual library and kept wanting to take the books off the shelves and read them. They had to have it explained to them that it was an art installation and, in some cases, what an art installation is. Wouldn’t do them any good as the objects are real books but bought second hand for their shape and size and the actual contents bear no relation to the covers and titles.
Also the titles are not in alphabetical order but completely random, with no sequence or meaning, which offended the obsessive-compulsive librarian in me.
As to the idea that a library of books about war is some kind of radical idea, I was genuinely puzzled. Some 26 universities in the UK offer War Studies courses, each of which will, of course, have libraries packed with books on the subject.
And as to the idea that researching these (fairly recent) wars required ten assistants, I was very puzzled since we nowadays have a thing called the internet which, at the click of a switch, will show you things like:
Hard to see how it can have taken ten assistants to go through these easy-to-find lists and extracting the ones he wanted. Would have taken me an hour or less. And which ones did Shonibare select? Well:
The War Library does not aim to provide a comprehensive list of every conflict and peace process, instead it provides an insight into the global and historic reach of colonisation and the role it has in shaping society today.
Ah. So wars where non-white peoples massacre each other are downplayed while anything involving white imperialists is foregrounded. In other words, this is a partial, biased and propagandist view of history. I wonder if such recent conflicts as the Syrian civil war, the Libyan civil war, the Yemen civil war or the Sudan civil war feature, or if they are excluded because they don’t fit the blame-imperialism-for-everything narrative.
The guide goes on to quote Shonibare:
‘We’ve had so many of these conflicts, and we’ve had so many peace treaties… Do we learn anything from them, or do we just ignore them, or do we just carry on the catastrophe?’
I was amused when the gallery host who I was chatting to herself volunteered the view that this is such a trite question it doesn’t even merit an answer. The logical problem in that statement is who is the ‘we’ he’s talking about? I think all of us progressive gallery-goers can probably agree that war is hell and that we’ve thought as much since we were at school. The trouble is that our fabulously peaceful opinions don’t stop people like the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) under Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces under Janjaweed leader, Hemedti, from tearing their country apart for personal gain. What they know is that military force does win victories, seize land, goods and plunder, and so is worth waging. What people who start wars know is that people do win wars and that the gains for the winner are worth the cost (for the leaders, at any rate). So they have learned from the past and what they’ve learned is that war pays. Does that help explain the world a bit, Yinka?
One last point: in the same quote he says that the work ‘raises questions about human memory and amnesia’. Really? You think that our current discourse and media and conversations have forgotten about imperial wars and have been erased by some kind of amnesia? Really? I wonder whether he’s heard of the three Imperial War Museums, the National Army Museum which fall over themselves to document and apologise for imperial wars, of the History Channel or history documentaries on the BBC, Channel 4 and Channel 5, or of the hundreds and hundreds of books, documentaries and exhibitions which pour off the presses and fill the media with accounts of British imperialism, the injustices of colonialism, the horror of slavery, and so on and so on.
Far from there being some kind of social amnesia about these issues, it seems to me that we are so oversaturated with them that, as in other European nations, the dominance of the progressive woke narrative has triggered a sizeable backlash among ordinary citizens who are fed up of being told that they or their parents are racist, imperialist exploiters and that their countries only owe their wealth to the slave trade / imperial exploitation etc.
I’m not taking sides. Just pointing out that the claim that these are forgotten issues strikes me as ludicrous.
2. Sanctuary City
The second installation is in the Serpentine’s biggest gallery which has been blacked out for the purpose. It consists of small-scale replicas of a dozen or so buildings from around the world which have acted as sanctuaries to refugees, in the historic past and the present.
Installation view of ‘Suspended States 2024’ by Yinka Shonibare CBE at Serpentine South, showing the ‘Sanctuary City’ installation © Yinka Shonibare CBE 2024. Photo © Jo Underhill. Courtesy Yinka Shonibare CBE and Serpentine
These are:
- Arima Boys Government School, Arima, Trinidad And Tobago
- Amnesty International, London, England
- Basmah Shelter, Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh
- Beaulieu Abbey, Hampshire, England
- Bibby Stockholm, Dorset, England
- Cathedral Of Saint Elijah, Aleppo, Syria
- Chinese Methodist Church, Hong Kong, China
- Chiswick Women’s Refuge, London, England
- Covenant House, Mexico City, Mexico
- Hôtel Des Mille Collines, Kigali, Rwanda
- Notre-Dame, Paris, France
- Peter Mott House, Lawnside, New Jersey, USA
- Pu’uhonua O Hōnaunau, Hawaii
- St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, Ireland
- Temple Of Hephaestus, Athens, Greece
- Tokeiji Temple, Kanagawa, Japan
- United Nations HQ, New York City, New York, USA
They can be grouped into categories such as ‘recent buildings’ (Hotel des Mille Collines, Rwanda, and Refuge’s headquarters in London), ‘sites of worship’ (Notre Dame Cathedral, Paris and the Chinese Methodist Church, Hong Kong) and ‘ancient sites’ (Temple of Theseus, Greece and the Tokeiji Temple, Japan).
As you can see, this is an interesting and thought-provoking list but the names aren’t actually visible anywhere (the exhibition wall labels give only the installation titles with no explanations). They’re only available if you’ve picked up the 15-page exhibition booklet.
Deprived of this knowledge, what you actually see is a collection of model buildings, all painted matt black on the outside with one or two lights to illuminate the interiors which are brightly decorated in Shonibare’s characteristic colourful patterns.
Installation view of ‘Sanctuary City’ at ‘Suspended States 2024’ by Yinka Shonibare CBE at Serpentine South, showing models of Notre Dame in Paris (left) and the UN building in New York (right) © Yinka Shonibare CBE 2024 (photo by the author)
According to the earnest and politically correct guidebook:
The installation highlights the basic human need for safety and shelter in a time of increasing regional conflict and socio-economic disparities. Shonibare describes shelter as ‘one
of the most pressing political concerns right now.’
According to the gallery host I chatted to about it, several of the toddlers who’ve visited with their parents have asked if they are dolls houses. This made me chuckle and immediately wish the models had been populated with little human figures, refugees in blankets cowering in the doorways or inside while supporters and opponents of hosting refugees held protest marches outside, waving banners and shouting through megaphones.
Shonibare thinks he’s ‘addressing’ contemporary issues but that’s really another way of saying ‘reacting to the news’. In this respect this installation is a bit like reading newspaper headlines in the Daily Mail or the Guardian about refugees. Yes, I see the problem, I had sort of heard about it since it has been one of the central subjects of British politics for the last ten years or so. May I politely ask what is your solution?
3. Decolonised Structures series
Shonibare has selected seven or eight of the statues of British historical figures which can be found all around London and Shonibared them, decorating them with his trademark Dutch wax colours and patterns.
‘Decolonised Structures’ (2022 to 2023) by Yinka Shonibare CBE. Commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation. Courtesy Yinka Shonibare CBE and Goodman Gallery, Cape Town, Johannesburg, London and New York; James Cohan Gallery, New York; and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London and New York. Photo © Stephen White & Co.
These are immediately more visually pleasing, striking and memorable than a library of books or a collection of architects models, which explains why they are used in all the promotional materials, press releases and posters for the exhibition. Also, despite the efforts of Shonibare and the curators to insist that they raise vital questions about colonialism and the legacy of empire blah blah blah, they are, essentially, comic.
They reminded me of the anti-capitalist protests of 2000 in Parliament Square (how did that go? have they overthrown capitalism yet?) whose sole outcome was that some wag cut a slice of turf and placed it on a statue of Winston Churchill so as to give him a punk Mohican. And how this image was itself taken up by street artist Banksy who made a copy of it, which he turned into prints, which can be bought for (unsigned) £10,500 to £16,000 or (signed) £70,000-100,000. There’s your artists overturning capitalism for you.
Back to the Shonibare works, the pamphlet devotes quite a lot of space to potted biographies of all these old imperial figures, including a lengthy explanation of who Queen Victoria was, for anybody who’s never heard of her before. I couldn’t help laughing when the guide carefully explained that the period of Victoria’s reign ‘is often referred to as the “Victorian Era”‘. When I read that I realised maybe the guide is for schoolchildren, a sentence like that is certainly pitched at school age. At which point it dawned on me that maybe the entire exhibition is pitched at schoolchildren: certainly the ‘messages’ are GCSE level –war is bad; we must help refugees; imperialism was dreadful. Reinforced when I read the potted biography of Winston Churchill who, it explains with the same level of condescension, was Prime Minister during the Second World War, ‘when he delivered powerful speeches’. This isn’t really BBC Bitesize level.
Installation view of ‘Decolonised Structures’ in ‘Suspended States 2024’ by Yinka Shonibare CBE at Serpentine South, showing statues of, from left to right: Clive of India, Kitchener of Khartoum and, remind me who the grumpy-looking bald guy on the right is? © Yinka Shonibare CBE 2024 (photo by the author)
I liked very much the luminous colours and patterns the statues have been covered with. Nowhere in the guide does it mention that they’re very trippy. I remember the hippy era, and then the 90s period of raves and E, when this world of swirling multicoloured patterns overlaying old statues would have gone down nicely to the accompaniment of the right medication.
I also noticed the careful way this patterning omitted a) the hilts of the swords some figures wear, which have been very carefully gilded, and b) the scrolls some figures hold, which have been carefully left a statue-sand colour. I guessed this was to draw attention to the use of Force (swords) and bogus Legality (the scrolls) by imperialists to impose imperial control over huge areas of the globe.
Detail of the statue of Sir Henry Bartle Frere showing how the scroll in his hand has been deliberately excluded from Shinobare’s flower power treatment in ‘Suspended States 2024’ by Yinka Shonibare CBE at Serpentine South (photo by the author)
Pondering this display and reflecting on all the other exhibitions and works you see these days mocking and criticising the British Empire and colonialism, I couldn’t help thinking it’s an easy subject, an open goal, like shooting turkeys in a barrel. Who’s going to object? All these figures are long dead and gone. Criticising the current rulers of Nigeria or any other African country, dwelling on the horrors of African civil wars or genocides, addressing the role of Islamic fundamentalism in Nigeria and across North Africa, the interventions of the Wagner Group, the neo-colonialism of the Chinese in Africa – all the interesting, difficult current issues in Africa, these are never the subject of contemporary art works. A lot more complicated, lot more risky. Keep it simple, keep it safe. Blame whitey.
What to do with old statues?
I got talking to the gallery host in the statue room and we had an interesting discussion about various aspects of them, for example the swords and scrolls thing I mentioned above. But she said in her opinion the most interesting question the display raises is, What should we do with these old statues of imperialist criminals / historical heroes (depending on point of view)?
She told me the work was party triggered as a response to the famous chucking into Bristol harbour of the controversial statue of Bristol slave trader Edward Colston on 7 June 2020. The Colston statue was recovered and triggered an extended debate about what to do with it. This has concluded with the damaged statue, in its graffitied state, being put on permanent display in the M Shed museum since 2021.
So what should we do with the hundreds of statues of British imperial figures which litter London, which were erected when they were heroes of British history and the British Empire, and who the public discourse, like a vast oil tanker, is slowly turning against in light of the unstoppable flood of revisionist, anti-colonial historical interpretations?
Pull them down? Hide them away? Put them in a specially-commissioned museum of imperial criminals?
The gallery host told me that Shonibare’s own opinion is that they should be left in place but given information panels which explain their true roles (i.e. Shonibare and woke progressives’ interpretation of their true roles). To take them down and store them, or even put them on display in a museum, would be to remove them from public spaces and so contribute to the general historical ‘amnesia’ which we’ve seen him deploring elsewhere.
Rorschach tests
The gallery host I chatted to about the dolls houses made the point that all three installations are like blank canvases onto which people project their own concerns, something she’s picked up from their questions and comments. Wars, refugees, imperialism are the Big Subjects of the three installations and people bring their own preconceptions and then project them onto the works. The works trigger people’s pre-existing opinions. Oh isn’t war awful. We must do something about these poor refugees. Wasn’t the British Empire dreadful.
Picking up on her point I suggested they’re like Rorschach tests, like the abstract shapes the Swiss psychologist Hermann Rorschach developed in the 1920s i.e. a hundred years ago, to detect psychological problems in patients who (he discovered) projected onto these abstract shapes the personal issues and obsessions they were suffering from. One way of thinking about them…
Venice Biennale
Shonibare will feature in the official Nigerian Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, from 20 April to 24 November 2024, one of eight intergenerational artists exhibiting in the ‘Nigerian Imaginary’. This, apparently, contemplates the current moment and presents a ‘defiant future’ for Nigeria. As I read this I couldn’t help thinking that, out in the real world, while artists and art critics spin their progressive fantasies, the ‘defiant future’ is happening now.
- Why Nigeria’s economy is in such a mess (BBC 27 February 2024)
- Nigeria: botched economic reforms plunge the country into crisis (The Conversation 6 March 2024)
- Africa Confidential Nigeria page
- BBC News Nigeria web page
Related links
- Suspended States by Yinka Shonibare CBE continues at Serpentine South until 1 September 2024
- Yinka Shonibare CBE website
Nigeria reviews
Fiction
- Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (1958)
- No Longer at Ease by Chinua Achebe (1960)
- Arrow of God by Chinua Achebe (1964)
- Arrow of God: Sayings of Wisdom by Chinua Achebe
- A Man of the People by Chinua Achebe (1966)
- The Trouble with Nigeria by Chinua Achebe (1983)
- Anthills of the Savannah by Chinua Achebe (1987)
- Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2003)
- Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2006)
Politics
- The Looting Machine by Tom Burgis (2015)
- Dictatorland: The Men Who Stole Africa by Paul Kenyon (2018)
Art
- A World in Common: Contemporary African Photography @ Tate Modern (2023)
- Wilfred Ukpong: Niger-Delta/Future-Cosmos @ Autograph ABP (2024)
Books & Boots 