Yinka Shonibare
In this work, the phrase ‘carriage clock’ – denoting a travelling timepiece smaller than a grandfather clock and larger than a wristwatch (which it precedes chronologically) – is reimagined in a more literal form. Here, a model carriage, fashioned after the British monarchy’s Irish State Coach, serves dual purpose as decorative object and clock. It is a piece characteristically Shonibare – an icon of colonial power reimagined, reduced and reupholstered in batik. The arms of the titular clock move backwards, the hours marked in reverse; its time read correctly only in the reflection offered by an interior mirror. The work’s form and finish extend reflections on the vestiges of empire and the fraught interrelations between Europe and the territories Europe colonised. The story of British imperialism, Shonibare suggests, is not one of narrative linearity.
b.1962, London
A theatrical inclination for drama informs Yinka Shonibare’s work, with its costumed figures (real and sculpted), elaborate tableaux, and stage-like settings. “The masquerade is about ambiguity,” he says, likening his practice to those carnivals that invite the assumption of characters and class otherwise foreign to its participants. Ambiguity – and, by extension, hybridity – are central to Shonibare’s articulation of his guiding themes; colonialism, globalism, and contemporary politics. “What I do is create a kind of mongrel,” he suggests. Resisting essentialist understandings of cultural identity, the artist pursues those colonial artefacts that offer more nuanced engagements with history. To this, batik fabric has become a recurring motif in his work, a material metaphor for the complexities of colonialism. Misattributed as an ‘African’ textile, the wax method with which the cloth is patterned was indigenous to Indonesia until Dutch settlers exported the technique to their colonies. In the mid-20th century, African independence movements rejected Western clothing as a colonial inheritance, adopting batik cloth in an unironic, yet wholly oxymoronic, gesture. Such contradictions invite the disassembly of received histories and identities, complicating long-held understandings of ‘British-ness’ and ‘African-ness’ – two seemingly opposed concepts that Shonibare, as a London-born artist of Nigerian descent, necessarily straddles.