Yinka Shonibare (b. 1962, London)

The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (Australia)

2008, chromogenic photograph, The Minneapolis Institute of Art (The C. Curtis Dunnavan Fund for Contemporary Art).

Image courtesy of the artist, Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, and James Cohan Gallery, New York ©Yinka Shonibare MBE. All Rights Reserved, DACS, UK / ARS, NY

Shonibare has replaced the clothes of the figure we see in Goya’s famous print from his Los Caprichos series with colourful batik fabric, a key signifier in many of Shonibare’s works. During the colonial period, the Dutch and British clothmakers profited by appropriating motifs from Indonesian batiks and selling them to the people of West Africa. Since then, they have been seen as an expression of African identity.  However, as Shonibare says, they “are not really authentically African the way people think. They prove to have a crossbred cultural background quite of their own." This multiple identity echoes Shonibare’s own dual identity as Nigerian and British. Reworking Goya’s image, Shonibare thus shifts Goya’s nightmare to contemporary debates around identity, race, and colonisation. This print is one of five variations, each representing a different continent with a sleeping figure at odds with the continent he represents. Here we see an African man representing Australia. Shonibare also updates Goya’s caption to “Do the dreams of reason produce monsters in Australia?”