Yinka Shonibare
Yinka Shonibare, MBE was born in London and moved to Lagos, Nigeria at the age of three. He returned to London to study Fine Art first at Byam Shaw College of Art (now Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design) and then at Goldsmiths College, where he received his MFA, graduating as part of the ‘Young British Artists’ generation. He currently lives and works in the East End of London.
2010 Nelson's Ship in a Bottle, Fourth Plinth Commission, Trafalgar Square, London, UK Yinka Shonibare: Earth, Wind, Fire, and Water, Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel Yinka Shonibare, MBE: Sculpture, Photography and Film, Western Michigan University, MI, USA Looking Up: Yinka Shonibare, MBE, Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, Monaco 2011 Yinka Shonibare, MBE, Alcalà 31, Comunidad de Madrid, Madrid, Spain, travelling to the Centro Atlantico de Arte Moderno (CAAM), Canary Islands 2012 Yinka Shonibare MBE: Addio del Passato, SCAD, Savannah, Georgia; Addio del Passato, James Cohan Gallery, New York, USA The Progress of Love, Pulitzer Foundation, St. Louis, MO
Histories of the Colonial screening event for Colonial Spectres: A moving Picture Blues film series curated by Christian Kravagna, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien (MUMOK), Vienna, Austria (Film: Addio del Passato) The 9th Baltic Biennial of Contemporary Art, Szczecin, Poland Encounters: Conflict, Dialogue, and Discovery, Princeton University Art Museum, New Jersey African Cosmos: Stellar Arts, Smithsonian, National Museum of African Art, Washington DC, USA Cotton: Global Threads, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, UK
2013 Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield, UK; Pearl Lam, Hong Kong, China Earth Matters: Land as Material and Metaphor in the Arts of Africa, Smithsonian Institute, National Museum of African Art, Washington DC, USA
Over the past decade, Shonibare has become well known for his exploration of colonialism and post-colonialism within the contemporary context of globalisation. Shonibare’s work explores these issues, alongside those of race and class, through the media of painting, sculpture, photography and, more recently, film and performance. Using this wide range of media, Shonibare examines in particular the construction of identity and tangled interrelationship between Africa and Europe and their respective economic and political histories. Mixing Western art history and literature, he asks what constitutes our collective contemporary identity today. Having described himself as a ‘post-colonial’ hybrid, Shonibare questions the meaning of cultural and national definitions.
Shonibare was a Turner prize nominee in 2004 and awarded the decoration of Member of the “Most Excellent Order of the British Empire”. He has added this title to his professional name. He was notably commissioned by Okwui Enwezor at Documenta 10 in 2002 to create his most recognised work ‘Gallantry and Criminal Conversation’ that launched him on an international stage. He has exhibited at the Venice Biennial and internationally at leading museums worldwide. In September 2008, his major mid-career survey commenced at the MCA Sydney and toured to the Brooklyn Museum, New York in June 2009 and the Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC in October 2009 . In 2010, 'Nelson's Ship in a Bottle' became his first public art commission on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square.