Talking With Yinka Shonibare

Yinka Shonibare, the London-based artist of Nigerian descent, was in New York recently to install his new retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum. While he was here we grabbed some lunch to talk about his background and his art. In this first part of the conversation we discuss the evolution of his best known works, the satires of colonialism and other power structures that he carries out by making headless figures dressed in 18th or 19th-century costumes. Those costumes are always made of “African” cloth that actually originated with the Dutch, who lifted it from the Batik cloth of their Indonesian colony, then marketed it to Africa. It’s a complicated world out there.

As usual I’ll split this conversation into a couple of parts.

LACAYO: Your parents are Nigerian but you were born in 1962 in London, where your father was a law student at the time. Three years later your family moved back to Lagos but kept a place in London where you spent summers. Did you think of yourself as Nigerian in those days, or as British, or as a transnational hybrid?

SHONIBARE: I thought of myself as kind of both. Nigeria was colonized by the British and we had to learn a lot of British things in school [in Nigeria]. Being bicultural for a Nigerian is completely normal. There’s nothing strange about it.

LACAYO: Did your family speak Yoruba at home?

SHONIBARE: We’d speak Yoruba at home and English at school, English being the official language of Nigeria. But there was no sense of hybrid culture. It was just the way things were.

LACAYO: Did you feel differences in social status as you moved back and forth from Nigeria to Britain? Your father was an attorney but anytime you returned to Britain you were still “just” Africans.

SHONIBARE: There was a lot of ethnic struggle in Britain in the 1960s. And when I arrived back in London in the early ‘80s, there was still some residue of that discrimination. London is so much better now. It’s very multicultural, a different generation and they’ve all grown up together.

LACAYO: When did you start to think of yourself an artist?

SHONIBARE: Well, I always wanted to do art. When I went to college I was actually meant to study law, but I switched. My father wasn’t pleased at all.

LACAYO: It was at art school where you became ill with the infection that left you partly paralyzed.

SHONIBARE: Two weeks into my course I got a virus in my spine that left me completely paralyzed. I just collapsed in class. I woke up after two weeks, tried to get up and I couldn’t. I was paralyzed completely from the neck down. I had to have rehab and physical therapy. I had to learn how to do everything again — dress myself, walk. I returned to art school in 1986, after about a three-year break.

LACAYO: What kind of art were you interested in at that point?

SHONIBARE: Van Gogh. I was mad about the letters of Van Gogh to his brother. And I liked Degas.

LACAYO: When did you start to think of yourself as more of a conceptual artist?

SHONIBARE: In art school I found out that the scope of art is much wider than I had thought. I hadn’t encountered conceptual artists before — feminist art, gay art, civil rights, all that.

LACAYO: There’s a story you’ve often told about a particular turning point for your art. You were in art school making work about perestroika and the crumbling of the Soviet system. But one day one of your instructors asked why you weren’t making art about African experience instead.

SHONIBARE: My work had become really political. There was the prospect of the Cold War coming to an end. It was quite an exciting moment and I got engaged in those issues. But my teacher said, What does that struggle got to do with you? You’re African, why don’t you make African art?

LACAYO: Wasn’t that kind of condescending? Like if someone came up to me and said, Your father is Nicaraguan, why don’t you write all the time about Latino art?

SHONIBARE: Exactly. But then I realized that regardless of what I thought about myself, I would be perceived in a particular way whether I liked it or not. So I decided that I have to face the fact that I’m of African origin, and what I produce has some expectations connected to it. Even if I don’t fulfull those expectations. If I didn’t do the African stuff, I’d just be a black artist who doesn’t make work about being black.

LACAYO: When you started thinking about what kind of Afro-centric art you could make as an artist living in London, did you first look at traditional African art?

SHONIBARE: Yeah, I went to the British Museum and looked at the masks and everything. Then I started some early paintings juxtaposing the images of those masks with commonplace objects, tacky consumer goods, almost like down at Wal-Mart. But I wanted to move it further, so I went to the markets and started talking to the vendors about the fabrics they sold, “African” textiles that it turned out were actually Indonesian fabrics marketed by the Dutch to Africans, who adopted them as their own. I always thought the fabrics were African. Then I started thinking, this is actually a very good metaphor for the whole issue of authenticity. Even the things that were supposed to represent Africa didn’t fulfill the fantasy of that history.