In the Studio: Yinka Shonibare

Since Yinka Shonibare’s London studio is currently empty—pieces are either being exhibited or are in production in another work space, in Sheffield, a few hours north—we arrange to meet at his house. And since, as he informs me when he answers the door, impeccably turned out in a dashing suit, “about 70 percent of my work is research,” it feels appropriate that we talk in his library, where he starts most of his days with the radio for company.

Eight years ago, Yinka Shonibare MBE—he was recently awarded the title Member of the British Empire, in recognition of his service to the nation, and has since incorporated the honorific into his name— moved to Mile End, a once gritty part of East London. The area has cleaned up its act, and the sedate streets lined with gastropubs have little in common with its seedy past. His house stands in a row of Victorian structures—appropriate, as much of his work references the 19th century. “My identity is formed by what was going on at that time, by the colonial relationship between Britain and Africa,” says the 45-year-old Shonibare, peering out from beneath a thick fringe of dreadlocks, head cocked inquisitively, evidence of an illness contracted during his teens that left him partially paralyzed.

In the library, Shonibare’s favorite books are arranged on a shelf; many other volumes have been relegated to the basement. He is a voracious reader. Among his formative texts are Edward Said’s Orientalism, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, and he talks about “rereading the canon”—Shakespeare, Dickens and others. “Rereading,” he says, “has a double meaning: I am literally rereading the text while also reading it in relation to contemporary dilemmas.”

Shonibare was born in England in 1962, was raised in Lagos, Nigeria, and moved back to London at age 17. He refers to himself as a “postcolonial hybrid.” This duality informs his willfully ambiguous tableaux, in which life-size headless figures of uncertain origin are dressed in European-style costumes fashioned from pseudoethnic fabrics. They embody the notion that culture is as much a construct as any art object. The scenes created are often variations of those depicted in other artworks, such as portraits by Gainsborough or Fragonard’s Swing, reproduced in a piece from 2001. The French Rococo artist’s oeuvre was also the inspiration for Shonibare’s Garden of Love, a multipart installation exhibited last June at the Musée du Quai Branly, in Paris, that presented viewers with romantic vignettes of couples surrounded by artificial flora and fauna.

The materials Shonibare employs are also amalgams of influences. The fabric for his costumes, for example, may appear African but is, in fact, Dutch: The batik designs were originally created in the 19th century in Holland and manufactured in England for sale in Indonesia; when consumers there proved uninterested, the cloth was sold cheaply in West Africa and the U.K. It is still available, and Shonibare buys it at the Brixton market, in South London. He likes to challenge the notion of African authenticity. “I am interested in how we create labels,” he explains.

After studying painting at London’s Byam Shaw School of Art, Shonibare earned a master’s degree at Goldsmiths. He soon became frustrated with what he calls painting’s “limited scope,” but he never abandoned the medium entirely. One of his best-known early pieces, Double Dutch, 1994, consists of 50 small works in which bright fabric replaces canvas as a support for the paint. A few years later, he began to cover various objects, such as bowls and a pair of women’s shoes, with the fabric. Inspired by a visit to the costume department of London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, he started using the textiles to make garments, which he initially suspended from the ceiling or draped on mannequins.

Shonibare’s art earned him a Turner Prize nomination in 2004, but two years before that, his Gallantry and Criminal Conversation made him the star at Documenta 10, in Kassel, Germany. The piece features a cast of elegantly dressed grandees bent toward one another in compromising positions over suitcases and trunks. The headless figures (a reference to the aristocrats guillotined during the French Revolution), cavorting oblivious to their condition, are on the Grand Tour, the Continental journey required of well-bred 18th-century English men and women. These extended trips were intended to be educational, but it was understood that travelers indulged in certain sexual liberties between lessons on art and culture. Shonibare reveals the decadent aspects of the tour under its façade of privilege and sophistication.