Yinka Shonibara MBE

Yinka Shonibare's Age of Reason
by Beth S. Gersh-Nesic

Yinka Shonibare MBE calls himself a "postcolonial hybrid." Born in London in 1962 of Nigerian parents who moved back to Lagos when the artist was three, Shonibare has always straddled different identities, both national and physical. Son of an upper middle-class lawyer, he summered in London and Battersea, attended an exclusive boarding school in England at age sixteen he enrolled in Byam Shaw School of Art, at age nineteen. One month into his art school studies he contracted a virus that rendered him paralyzed. After three years of physical therapy, Shonibare remains partially disabled.

These dual identities--African/British; physically able/challenged--are only two of Shonibare's acknowledged hybrid conditions. He knows that his name sounds feminine to the uninitiated, and his recently acquired title Yinka Shonibare MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire) conjures up thoughts of exoticism, imperialism, globalization, and cultural confluence, just like his signature medium Dutch batik fabric.
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22 obras creadas en su mayoría desde el 2008 centradas en El sueño de la razón inspirado en la obra de Goya y la serie fotográfica inspirada en el Infierno de Dante.