What type of art does yinka shonibare make

Artist Yinka Shonibare examines contemporary identity through the loaded and complex lens of post-colonialism.

Yinka shonibare artwork analysis

Inspired by his own experiences as a Black man who grew up in both England and Nigeria, his work combines influences from the canons of both Western and indigenous African art, history, and literature to inform conceptual portraits of the unique human experience that emerges from the convoluted relationships spawned by globalization. Shonibare, who has called himself "a postcolonial hybrid" and a "post-Enlightenment person," says "all of the things that are supposed to be wrong with me have actually become a huge asset.

I'm talking about race and disability. They're meant to be negatives within our society. But they're precisely the things that have liberated me. Because they are me, what I express. So, it has not been a negative thing to be who I am but a positive thing. Shonibare fashioned batik fabrics into Western-style Victorian-era dresses, to adorn headless mannequins, one of whom turns toward the interior of the grouping, while the other two face outward.

The artist has explained that the headless-ness was intended as a joke connected to the revenge killings of aristocrats in the French Revolution, saying "the idea of bringing back the guillotine was very funny to me. Shonibare does not like his figures to be racially identifiable, chopping off their heads helps.

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Batik, a method of producing colored designs on textiles by dyeing them, having first applied wax to the parts to be left undyed, is commonly associated with "African" wear yet is actually not at all African. It was derived in Indonesia and manufactured by the Dutch during the colonial era, then exported to their colonies in Africa. As Ose notes, the origins of the fabric "are embedded in an oxymoronic narrative of colonial embezzlements and reappropriations.

And it's the fallacy of that signification that I like. It's the way I view culture - it's an artificial construct.