Yinka Shonibare is a contemporary British-Nigerian artist who makes sculptures featuring the (ostensibly) African Ankara printed fabrics--on clothes worn by headless figures, on books, on abstract sculptures. These colorful patterned prints are nowadays immediately associated with Africa, but the fabric’s true origin is in Europe.
During Dutch colonization of Indonesia (as the Dutch East Indies), the knowledge of the Indonesian printing style batik reached European colonizers’ ears and eyes. Ankara prints, or Dutch wax prints, were mass-produced imitations of batik meant to infiltrate and take over the Indonesian fabric market as a cheaper alternative to batik.
This infiltration failed; Dutch wax could not hold up to the authentic batik. But unexpected traction in West Africa spurned production of Ankara prints in Europe, and eventually as the fabric spread across Africa it became more African-made and owned, and took on an identity and association as African.
A MoMa gallery label of Shonibare’s piece How Does a Girl Like You Get to Be a Girl Like You? reads: “‘African fabric signifies African identity,’ explains the artist, ‘rather like American jeans (Levi's) are an indicator of trendy youth culture. In Brixton, African fabric is worn with pride amongst radical or cool youth [....] It becomes an aesthetics of defiance, an aesthetics of reassurance, a way of holding on to one's identity in a culture presumed foreign or different.’” In this way, something that was once foreign and inserted into a culture through colonization has become a symbol of that culture.A person born and living in Europe who is of African descent wears Ankara prints to show their heritage to Africa, but those prints were once European produced. African-Europeans are wearing European-African fabrics.
Shonibare himself has a heritage that cannot be so simply traced. He was born in London in 1962, but lived in Lagos, Nigeria for ages 3 to 16 years old. At age 17 he returned to Britain, where he now lives and where he received his two arts degrees from. His mixed origin has become a founding of his art practice. Shonibare’s work revolves around these complex histories of colonization, post-colonization and identity. It started when his tutor at the Byam Shaw School of Art questioned his art practice: “You’re of African origin, aren’t you? Well why aren’t you producing authentic African art?” Shonibare said in an interview in Apollo Magazine, “It was that word that became a catalyst for everything I did. I began to question this notion of ‘authenticity.’”
Jamaican-born British author and activist Stuart Hall’s essay “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” proposes that “perhaps instead of thinking of identity as an already accomplished fact, which the new cultural practices then represent, we should think, instead, of identity as a 'production' which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation.” This fits perfectly within the history of Ankara prints. If the Ankara prints’ identity is constituted within representation, and now that representation is of Africa, Ankara is now African despite its roots.
Yinka Shonibare’s sculptures capture this instability of identity by combining different cultural elements into single works that both celebrate cultural mixing and question its history in colonialism and future in xenophobia. His 2018 piece The American Library is a massive collection of shelved books wrapped in Ankara fabric with names printed in gold along the spines: “the names of people who immigrated, or whose antecedents immigrated to the United States. On other books are the names of African Americans who relocated or whose parents relocated out of the American South during the Great Migration” (https://www.theamericanlibraryinstallation.com/about). It is a response to calls for enhanced borders--the plan to “build the wall” under the Trump administration; the notion that immigration is harmful and immigrants should be or are “illegal.” The names written on the spines are those of people who have significantly impacted America. They are immigrants or descended from immigrants, and they could never have come to America and changed it without immigration. So much of America’s cultural foundation is on its history of immigrants enriching its culture and breadth of knowledge. Even those who despise generous immigration policies once benefitted from them: Donald Trump’s name is on one of Shonibare’s spines. Trump’s grandfather was an immigrant.
Artist Nick Cave also works with textile and fashion art to tackle issues of identity. He is best known for his “Soundsuits”: described by the New York Times as “ornate, full-body costumes designed to rattle and resonate with the movement of the wearer.” He articulates through them his experience as a black man in America. The suits are made of a variety of materials, often using materials that are not seen as valuable or of high art, similar to how he is sometimes viewed as a person or artist and how issues black people face are viewed. They are “both insulating and isolating, an articulation of his profound sense of vulnerability as a black man” (O’Grady). He often performs inside them. They demand his identity as an artist to be seen while hiding other perceptions of the wearer behind the thick costume.
These Soundsuits invert Jacques Laclan’s concept of the “mirror stage,” the moment a child first recognizes themselves in a mirror. Cave’s works have the opposite effect of a reflection of outward appearance; they do not at all resemble his appearance, but represent the experience and identity of him that his body cannot show. Where Shonibare tangles up tangible iterations of identity and history together, Cave creates a completely different object that breaks him out of perceptions of his identity or history.
Yinka Shonibare’s and Nick Cave’s distinct uses of fashion in sculpture each reflect and analyze their identities as people of African heritage living in a post-colonial, hyperconnected world. They express in visual, tangible ways the concepts Stuart Hall brings up about identity in the modern era. They are both valuable contemporary artists and demonstrate the range that fashion sculpture can hold.
