This book, Yinka Shonibare MBE released by Prestel, is an expanded version of its 2008 edition, reaching even further into Shonibare’s evolving narrative of Africa, Europe, and the international collisions of identity. It’s a colossal book for a mid-career artist, with some 240 pages including two essays, and an interview, yet as the work shows there is a lot of meaning to delve through as Shonibare stitches together his own background with the broader history of race and class in the world. It’s even right there in his name where the “Member of the Order of the British Empire” distinction he was awarded in 2005 is tacked onto his African name. As Rachel Kent, chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, writes in her introduction, he always puts himself “both within and outside the structures he critiques.”
In his book interview with Anthony Downey, who directs the master’s in contemporary art program at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, Shonibare describes how in school a tutor asked him, “You are African, aren’t you; why don’t you make authentic African art?” He was “quite taken aback by this” but through “thinking about authenticity” he started to wonder what an “authentic Africanness” would be. And this is how he ended up working with the (Indonesian) batik fabrics as his main medium.
Quote from e-zine Hyperallergic.