Yinka Shonibare MBE

More about the book

Shonibare employs a wide range of media - sculpture, painting, photography, video, and installation pieces - to explore matters of race, class, cultural identity, and history. The artist is best-known for his use of a Dutch-wax fabric, which, though labeled as "African," actually originated in Dutch Indonesia and was introduced to Africa by British manufacturers via Dutch colonizers in the nineteenth century. Incorporating the fabric into Victorian dresses, covering sculptures of alien figures with it or stretching it onto canvases, Shonibare uses the fabric as a metaphor to address issues of origin and authenticity. Published as a companion to Shonibare's first retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia, and the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, this survey explores all aspects of Shonibare's work, offering a fully comprehensive portrait of his projects. Whether he is lampooning Victorian propriety or commenting on the latent ambiguities of the term "alien," Shonibare makes art.