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In the fall of 2000 Yinka Shonibare had a solo show at Camden Art Centre, an installation piece in "Intelligence: New British Art" at Tate Britain, and a digital work in the new Welcome Wing of the Science Museum. Suddenly, he seemed to be everywhere in London. And his reach wasn't limited to Britain. He had solo shows in New York and, in 2001, in Rome and Johannesburg. He had a piece in the notorious "Sensation" exhibition and recently won an honorable mention at the Venice Biennale. His work is eye-catching, excessive, often beautiful-but why the interest in Shonibare, and why now?
Part of the answer lies in the increased range of his art and the sophistication of his manipulation of popular icons. His work has expanded in subject matter and media over the past three years, leading to a significant body of paintings, photographs, installations, and semisurrealistic objects which comment with wit and humor on themes of history, identity, and fantasy. Sometimes he plays with scale-- Jane Austen and the Brontes are presented as figurines on a tabletop, toying with their position as "giants of literature" (Fig. 3--and sometimes with race, as in the image of the black footballers repeated throughout the fabrics used to furnish his elaborate Victorian Philanthropist's Parlour (Figs. 1, 2), or the cafe-au-lait-- colored skin on the huntsmen in the installation Hound (Figs. 4-6). He often uses "African" fabrics in his paintings and installations, ethnicizing in unexpected places, startling the viewer into asking, "Why are the spacemen wearing this?" and then, a moment later, "Why not?"
For Shonibare, the cloth is an apt metaphor for the entangled relationship between Africa and Europe and how the two continents have invented each other, in ways currently overlooked or deeply buried. The basic historical joke is that while the fabric (sometimes referred to as Dutch Wax) looks "African" and is of the sort often worn to indicate black pride in Brixton or Brooklyn, it is, in fact, printed fabric based on Indonesian batik, manufactured in the Netherlands, Britain, and other countries (including some in west Africa) and then exported to west Africa, where it is a popular, but foreign, commodity. The implication, then, is that nothing is as authentic as it may seem.