“I enjoy presenting impossibility.”
In May 2010 a surreal sight appeared atop a large stone plinth in London’s Trafalgar square: a reduced-sized replica of 19th-century British Admiral Lord Nelson’s wooden warship encased in a bottle measuring more than 15 feet in length and nine feet in diameter. The wooden vessel, crowned with brightly patterned sails made of Ankara fabric, or so-called Dutch wax cloth, seemed an apparition if not a hallucination. The question on everyone’s mind: How exactly did the enormous ship get into the bottle? The answer remains a mystery, as the British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare is not spilling his secrets. As Shonibare himself has remarked, “I enjoy presenting impossibility.” This is a modest admission by the artist, whose wide-ranging work is collected by museums globally and brims with fantastical sights. One of the artist’s earliest and most well-known sculptures, How Does a Girl Like You Get to Be a Girl Like You, features three headless mannequins dressed in Ankara fabric fashioned into elaborately ruffled, Victorian-style dresses. The vitality of their costumes and various poses suggests that they are somehow alive and walking through the gallery, while their headless forms and long dresses that conceal legs and feet suggest they are floating, silent ghostly apparitions made visible by clothing wrapped around transparent bodies. In this sculpture group, as in Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle, the artist brings visions of the past into the present—a theme that unites his array of artworks that include film, sculpture, prints, and paintings.
Shonibare does not present us with a vague notion of the past. Instead, he reimagines and represents long-overlooked contributions of African peoples within Eurocentric histories, histories that often diminish the globally important cultural and economic contributions of the diverse African continent and its diasporas. The impetus for his work came when Shoinbare returned to London, after spending his youth in Nigeria, to study at the Byam Shaw School of Painting and Drawing. He recalls that his tutor asked, “You are African aren’t you; why don’t you make authentic African art?” Shonibare was shocked by this question, rooted in bigoted racial politics born from centuries of British settler colonialism in Africa and beyond. He set his energies toward dismantling this prejudice by making artworks that consider what and to whom “signifiers of such ‘authentic’ Africanness would look like.”
Ankara fabric is Shonibare’s signature medium for exploring these questions. The cloth reveals a long, interconnected history of the two continents and makes apparent the impossibility of European ideas that marginalize Africa and its various peoples. The colorful patterned fabric, now commonly associated with Western and Central African clothing, was first introduced to Africa in the 19th century by Dutch and Scottish merchants. The industrially produced cloth approximates the distinctive colors and patterns of hand-crafted Indonesian batiks familiar to the Dutch, who had since the 16th century violently colonized the Indonesian archipelago. Residents of West Africa, who already collected Indian and European textiles, subsequently embraced the fabric as a highly desirable status symbol, both resisting and propelling European economic and cultural control in the region.
Shonibare is now keenly aware of this colonial history, but in his youth wore wax cloth garments believing the textiles were “authentically” African. Today he sees “the fabrics [as] signifiers [...] of ‘Africanness’ insofar as when people first view the fabric, they think of Africa,” but also as a “the metaphor of interdependency,” among a vast network of peoples—many formerly enslaved—cultures, and economies globally. For Shonibare, this interdependency is evidence of an impossibility: that “this purity [or authenticity of African culture] notion is nonsense.” His conspicuous use of Ankara makes visible the fundamental role of Africa in global human histories past, present, and future. That Shonibare is a member of the British Royal Academy and was named by Queen Elizabeth II a Commander of the British Empire (CBE)—designations that connect him with institutions that historically oppressed African peoples’ arts and cultures—speaks to the artist’s critical examination of the “twin poles of irreverence and reverence,” of both living in and beyond British colonial legacies. Shonibare’s artistic vision, which glimpses into a past at once real and imaginary, suggests a new paradigm of history in which he asks us to consider what might be possible by presenting us with very real impossibilities.
Sarah Mallory, art historian, 2024
Note: opening quote is from Rachel Kent, ed. “Setting the Stage: Yinka Shonibare MBE in Conversation with Anthony Downey.” Yinka Shonibare MBE, 43 - 50 (London ; New York : Prestel, 2014), 46.
