Yinka Shonibare CBE, RA

born 9 August 1962, London, UK

Shonibare is a British-Nigerian artist who works in photography, painting, sculpture, installation, and film. He was born in Lagos but studied art in London. It was during this period that he fell ill with a virus that attacked his spine, causing half of his body to become paralyzed. Because of his illness, Shonibare uses a wheelchair, and is an advocate for accessibility and inclusion in the art world. He was elected to the British Royal Academy as a sculptor.

 Shonibare describes himself as a “post-colonial hybrid”, for example speaking English at school and Yoruba at home. He holds that culture is not static, but something that adapts, and changes when it comes into contact with another culture. His work uses citations of Western art history and literature to question the validity of contemporary cultural and national identities within the context of globalisation. Through examining race, class and the construction of cultural identity, his works comment on the tangled interrelationship between Africa and Europe, and their respective economic and political histories.

 When his tutor at art school asked him why he, as an African, didn’t make authentic African art, he began to explore using African fabrics as part of his art works. In the 19th century, Dutch colonial merchants manufactured these fabrics in Indonesia, using patterns from local batik.  This traditional technique involves painting lines on the material in wax before it is dyed and then removing the wax when the fabric is dry to reveal the pattern underneath. The most profitable market for these fabrics was in West Africa where the Dutch had a number of colonies. During the 1960s, as African countries started gaining independence from colonial European powers, the fabric began to be used as a symbol of African identity and freedom. Shonibare’s use of it soon became his signature.

 Shonibare uses the fabric to dress headless, life-size sculptures. In his 2003 artwork Scramble for Africa, for example, Shonibare reconstructed the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, when European leaders negotiated and arbitrarily divided the continent between them.  Here the headless figures symbolise Africans’ loss of humanity as well as showing the European leaders “as mindless in their hunger for what the Belgian King Leopold II called 'a slice of this magnificent African cake.'"

 Shonibare has exhibited at leading museums worldwide and at the prestigious Venice Biennial. His work is featured in collections such as Zeitz MoCAA in Cape Town, Tate, London, and the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institute, Washington D.C. He was awarded a CBE - Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire - in 2019. You might think it strange that an artist whose work is all about colonialism would accept this award, but, as he says, “it’s all in a days’ work for a ‘post-colonial hybrid’.”