Yinka Shonibare
Short Biography
Yinka Shonibare was born October 12, 1962 in London. He began his career by studying Fine Art at the Byam Shaw School of Art (now Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design), extending his education to the mastery level and earning his MFA at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he graduated as part of the Young British Artists (YBA) generation. At 18, Shonibare contracted traverse myelitis, a spinal cord inflammation resulting in one side of his body being paralyzed long-term. After his studies, Shonibare worked at Shape Arts, an organization that makes the arts accessible to people who are disabled. Since the disability impedes him from actually constructing his works himself, Shonibare uses assistants to build and carry out the vision of his masterpieces.
Shonibare has been lauded by the fine arts community for his work, becoming an Honorary Fellow of Goldsmiths College in 2003, receiving an Honorary Doctorate of the Royal College of Art in 2010, elected Royal Academician by the Royal Academy of Arts in 2013. He has exhibited at the influential Venice Biennale and top global museums. In 2004, Shonibare was awarded an MBE (The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire), which recognizes contributions to the arts and sciences. In that same year, he was also shortlisted for the Turner Prize.
Sources: http://www.africansuccess.org/visuFiche.php?id=193&lang=en | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yinka_Shonibare
About the Interview and His Work
In the interview, Shonibare discusses the exhibit he has curated for Deloitte Ignite, a contemporary arts festival executed by the collaboration of the consulting giant Deloitte and the Royal Opera House. He talks considerations of "authenticity" and audacity, two themes that seem to drive the basis of his curatorial vision and conversation. In creating this exhibit, he wants to continue to British culture — like he's always done — with his points of race, class, and the disruption of the comfortable order.
In his work, Shonibare shocks. On a surface level, one can even see such through the textiles he uses, bright and frenzied in color and pattern, the cloths he's known for incorporating in his works. He tackles colonialism and its pervasive effects on cultures and ways of life in the continent, race considerations, and class. Though always vivid and vibrant, Shonibare's work constantly tackles the darkest issues; in the interview, Casely-Hayford comments on the beauty of his work, on how "aesthetically arresting" it is, and Shonibare informs him that though it may be beautiful, "within [his] work, there's always this sort of dark underbelly."
Shonibare in the Larger Narrative of African Art History
I would argue that Shonibare, time and again, references (skeptically) the question of authenticity in African art form. In the video, he discusses working as a young artist during the Cold War and being confronted and questioned by his tutors about his African identity. They asked him, "So why aren't you producing ethnic, authentic African art?' He exclaimed,"What? I grew up in Lagos, listening to James Brown!"In the larger narrative, that response references the box that African artists are placed in — they're not really allowed to move forward, to be mobile and dynamic in their visions of how "African" life and identities can be depicted. That statement reminded me of Malick Sidibe's work Fans de Jimi Hendrix (1971). the way it subverts the Western tendency to place all African lived experiences in a traditional confine. After that experience with his tutors, Shonibare "started to ask a series of questions," including, "What is authenticity? What does constitute the authentic?" which led him to his now-famous usage of the Dutch was fabrics, which aren't even made in an African country — the fact that these fabrics are European-created to represent what Europeans believe clothing in Africa is like. To model their own constructed definition of authenticity. This plagues a near-total amount of work in the African art world.
