Yinka Shonibare MBE at the Smithsonian

On a dreary, dark morning in DC, I drove at a steady 12 miles an hour through the District’s suffocated streets, on my way to a conference on Palestine held at The Jerusalem Fund across town.  Due to a severe underestimation of the navigability of DC’s surface streets during rush hour (like a true Los Angeleno, I am tragically dependent on my car for transportation), I missed my conference and had to satisfy myself with a visit to the Smithsonian instead.  A few Metro stops later, I was in the subterranean galleries of the  National Museum of African Art, observing perhaps the most powerful postcolonial work I have yet seen from an African artist.

Yinka Shonibare MBE is a British-born Nigerian whose work, which includes sculpture, painting, mixed-media installations, photography, and film, couples binaries with striking results.  His sculptures are all of headless men, women, and children, whose race is unclear, dressed in pre-French Revolution gowns and frocks that are sewn from the ornate, bold “Dutch-wax” fabric still widely available across much of Africa today.  While this fabric is often misconstrued as being authentically African, it is manufactured in Britain and the Netherlands, and was originally based off Indonesian batik prints.  In an interview in 2002, Shonibare commented on his use of these textiles: “They prove to have a crossbred cultural background quite of their own.  And it’s the fallacy of that signification that I like.  It’s the way I view culture—it’s an artificial construct.”

In his film piece, Odile and Odette, Shonibare juxtaposes two ballerinas – one white, one African, both wearing classical tutus made of Dutch wax fabric – as reflections of one another in one mirror.  We see each dancer emulating the other’s movements and expressions, although the emphasis here is on the African dancer who is enacting a careful and studied imitation of the highly valued, and European-produced, ballet art form.

In addition to Shonibare’s obvious statements on race, his attention to the colonial economic and political exploitations of Africa are sharp and at times, disturbing.  His sculpture installation piece, Gallantry and Criminal Conversation, earned the exhibition a PG-13 rating for its graphic displays of sexual interaction.

Men and women, dressed yet again in Dutch-wax fabric 18th century costume, are posed atop closed wooden trunks in sexually explicit positions.  “This is capitalism at its best,” one of the security guards noted to me.  The comment penetrates the core of the piece, observing colonial imperialists’ literally “fucking” Africa over its concealed stores of wealth.

The artist makes further economic and even environmental commentary in his painting/installation piece, Black Gold I. The title is a direct reference to Africa’s oil and gold resources, sources of conflict and economic gain that observe no territorial borders or ethical boundaries.  We see the black paint splattered like oil across a white wall, and the circular canvases displayed without succinct lines of division or order.  The images on the canvases themselves are of flowers and branches, either stretched, unpainted fabric or paintings administered in thick, tactile layers of paint.  It is a focused explosion of a piece, controlled and raging at once.

The messages in Shonibare’s work are rich and multilayered, but much of his strength comes from the clear symbolism and ready accessibility of his argument to the average viewer.  No individual who comes into contact with one of his pieces will walk away scratching their head and muttering about the incoherencies and pretensions of fine art.  His work is sharp and solid, and hits its audience with a cacophony of fresh material to rethink Africa’s often forgotten past and the roots of its present struggles.

Exhibition of Yinka Shonibare MBE at the National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C. until March 7, 2010.