Yinka Shonibare CBE wears that title, pointedly, as part of his name. The artist declares himself a Commander of the British Empire in full knowledge of the historical legacy and contemporary friction the title carries.
Over a 40-year career, Shonibare has explored the impact of imperialism and millennia-long histories of cultural exchange. As a critical thinker his tendency is more “yes, and” than “no”. He is interested in leading conversations forward rather than shutting them down. Will he accept an honour in the name of the British Empire? Yes, and he’ll invite us to think a beat about all that implies.
Now in his early sixties, Shonibare is an artist of international acclaim. His commission for the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square – Nelson’s Ship in A Bottle (2010) – was so popular that it has been given a permanent home in Greenwich. Thanks to his use of colourful Dutch wax cloth – a cotton textile based on Indonesian batik, long manufactured in the Netherlands and sold in West Africa – his work is highly recognisable. He has reached that level of artworld fame where his work is taught to primary school children.
This can be a sticky career stage for artists. Do they keep churning out a rehash of their greatest hits? Do they gun for ever larger public commissions? Do they succumb to a midlife crisis and freak out about remaining youthful and relevant?
Despite the ubiquity of his work in thematic exhibitions, the Serpentine’s Suspended States is Shonibare’s first solo institutional show in London for 20 years. When I walked in to see a miniaturised version of one of his Wind Sculptures, my heart sank. The Wind Sculptures are works in bronze that look like dancing sheets of fabric. They’re lovely, but at this point they’re also a familiar feature in the public realm. There are Wind Sculptures installed in various cities in the US as well as the UK. Was the Serpentine show just going to be an elaborate pitch for more major commissions? Was Shonibare resting on his laurels? Was he phoning it in?
Mercifully, no. Suspended States is contemporary, thoughtful and tremendously moving. It is, indeed, a masterclass in how a successful artist can marshal his considerable resources in extraordinary ways.
The heart-stopping centrepiece is Sanctuary City (2024), a darkened gallery filled with perfectly rendered miniature buildings, each one illuminated from within and lined with brightly patterned fabric. Each has, in different ways, represented refuge – the Hôtel des Milles Collines in Kigali sheltered 1,268 people during the 1994 Rwanda genocide; the Chiswick Women’s Refuge in London opened in 1971 as the first shelter for victims of domestic violence; Notre-Dame in Paris offered sanctuary throughout the medieval period.
Shonibare has included administrative bodies, among them the London offices of Amnesty International, the UN in New York and a Basmah Shelter in Bangladesh. He also acknowledges the limits and failures of sanctuary. Lurking among the structures in this darkened gallery is the Bibby Stockholm, a barge used to house asylum seekers, notorious for its inadequate sanitary conditions and overcrowding.
The symbol of the lantern in the darkness is an ancient one. Sanctuary City transforms these buildings into lanterns offering hope in dark times. Shonibare has selected examples from around the world, from Syria to Hawai’i, reminding us that the need for sanctuary is universal.
Where Sanctuary City is quiet and persuasive, the headline-grabbing work here is Decolonised Structures, for which Shonibare has re-modelled statues of colonial figures from public sites around London. Removed from their high plinths, brought down to ground level and shrunk back to human size, Winston Churchill, Sir Robert Clive, Sir Henry Frere, Earl Kitchener, Charles Napier, Frederick Roberts and Queen Victoria have received an eye-catching Dutch wax cloth patterned glow-up.
The gallery’s location is impeccable. Kensington Gardens is home to public monuments on a lavish scale, among them the Albert Memorial and a grand commemorative sculpture to Queen Victoria. To the south, an equestrian statue of Robert Napier guards Queen’s Gate. Today, the names of the men (and with the exception of Queen Victoria, they are, inevitably, men) on the plinths are often unfamiliar, and their exploits largely forgotten. In the booklet accompanying the show, Shonibare lists their military honours, as well as the thousands who died – of starvation and disease, as well as violence – as a result of their actions.
In central London we walk past and barely see these memorials. As with Hew Locke’s artworks proposing that such sculptures are dressed in military and colonial bling, Shonibare’s patterned embellishments force these figures back into the visible realm – the familiar made strange again – and back into public conversation.
It is in the third major body of work here that Shonibare really deploys his resources. The War Library (2024) is not the first installation the artist has created using books as his medium (an earlier work, The British Library, is now part of Tate’s collection). The Serpentine’s East gallery is lined with shelves filled with 5,270 old books of various sizes, all freshly covered in Dutch wax cloth. About half have a title embossed on the spine – the name of an imperial conflict or peace treaty. Very few are familiar. This library is a vast testament not only to war but also collective amnesia. The scale of the thing is devastating.
The installation is of course a work of sculpture rather than a functional library, but Shonibare and his studio have created an online resource providing information about each of the wars listed in the work. That’s 2,700 conflicts – each one a struggle for power and territory resulting in the loss of human life. As with so much in the Barbara Kruger exhibition that ran in this gallery before Shonibare, the overwhelming scope of this work is a brutal reminder that it will always feel grotesquely timely. It is a vision of war become ubiquitous and eternal.
(Shonibare doesn’t just channel his income from art into grand gestures of commemoration – a large display at the back of the gallery also details the support he provides to artists in London and Lagos, and his ecological farm in rural Nigeria.)
Two smaller galleries house works on paper, and pictorial embroideries that draw on a blend of sources. Two quilt-like works in applique are based on source material from the medieval Mappa Mundi, detailing the monsters believed to lurk in far-off lands – each in its own way betraying a fear of the unknown. I can only imagine
Shonibare took childlike glee in his choice of monsters, which includes the bull-like Bonnacon pictured in action as it directs a torrent of caustic excrement towards its enemies.
It is this sense of playfulness – this ‘yes, and’ tendency – that sets Shonibare apart, I think. He is keenly aware both of the ills in our present moment and the long history that brought us here. Without question, there is much that upsets and angers him, but he seems to achieve what the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci famously described as “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will”. Ultimately, his works feel like beacons of hope.
Yinka Shonibare: Suspended States, Serpentine, London, 12 April – 1 September