Britain is littered with symbols of death and exploitation; not hidden away shamefully, but raised up, celebrated and gloried. Public sculptures of controversial historical figures are everywhere, and now they’re in the Serpentine too, because Yinka Shonibare CBE has put them there.
The Nigerian-British art megastar has filled the gallery with recreations of statues of Churchill, Kitchener, Queen Victoria and Clive of India. But they’re scaled down, their power diminished, minimised, undermined. They’re puny now, smaller than you, weak. And of course, they’re covered in Shonibare’s signature Dutch wax print (colourful fabric inspired by Indonesian printing traditions, traded by the Dutch, ubiquitous in Africa, and now used by Shonibare as visual shorthand for the complex history of colonialism).
This is what Yinka Shonibare CBE – that Commander of the British Empire title matters – does, what he’s always done: highlight, tear apart and subvert the legacy of British imperialism with directness, colour and wit. The debate around public statues of figures like Churchill and Clive – whose accomplishments came at a terrible human cost, who caused so much pain to the people over whom they ruled – has been raging for years now, and it feels like the flames of its anger abated a while ago. But Shonibare’s installation is a clever, almost joyful reappropriation of historical pain, injustice and trauma.
It makes for grim if colourful viewing
Shonibare has filled the central gallery with architectural models of places of sanctuary – the Amnesty International offices, Tokeiji Temple in Japan which protected women fleeing domestic violence, Peter Mott House in New Jersey which was part of the Underground Railroad – a darkly atmospheric, fragile paean to the need for safety in a dangerous world. In among them is a model of the Bibby Stockholm barge, used by the UK government to hold asylum seekers in cramped, dirty, unsafe conditions. Maybe not all places of refuge are what they seem.
The final work is a library of books about war from throughout history, all rebound in Dutch wax print. Shonibare is forcing us to ask who writes history, whose perspective is elevated above others, whose lives are worth more, what matters? It makes for grim if colourful viewing.
The works on canvas here are not his strong suit, and the timeline of his GAS artist residency program is a missed opportunity to amplify the artists he’s done so well to support over the years. And though the rest of the show is good, you can’t help feeling that it’s the exact same idea he’s been churning out for decades. There’s nothing new here, but if you had an idea this good you’d probably overdo it too.