Reencountering his work now was a bit like visiting a promising and much missed friend after a long separation. Mostly, it was warm and exciting and wonderful to see his continued success while reacquainting myself with his oeuvre. Yet, it is hard to recapture how timely and impactful that initial encounter was back in 2002. Once the glow of reacquaintance faded, I had to admit I would have liked to have seen more experimentation and growth in his recent creations, without which the show as a whole could not help but feel a bit repetitive and stale. Taken individually, though, the sculpture in the Meijer galleries still rewarded long and careful looking.
As has always been the case, Shonibare’s sculptural interventions at first read as celebratory, crowd-pleasing reminders of the interconnectedness of the world, particularly in the colonial and post-colonial periods, playfully undermining any ideas of cultural essentialism. The colorful re-contextualizations and reinvigorations of famous images, objects, people, or texts easily sweep viewers away with the pure pleasure of their spectacle. However, his more layered works also include reminders that the relationships between colonizing and colonized nations are far from easy. In Girl Ballerina (pictured at top and bottom), Shonibare has recreated Edgar Degas’s Little Dancer Aged Fourteen (1878–81), redressing her in wax-printed cloth, enlarging her to life-size, and removing her head. More subtly, the girl’s hands are no longer clasped behind her to stretch her muscles. Instead, they hide an antique gun, a change only visible once the visitor has walked around the sculpture or approached it from behind. Who the menacing gun is for and who the dancer herself is, however, are left effectively ambiguous.
Yinka Shonibare CBE: Planets in My Head was open March 1–October 23 2022 at the Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park in Grand Rapids, MI. Hover over images for more information on each work.
