YINKA SHONIBARE MBE The artist discusses the human form and headlessness in some of his most celebrated works

Yinka Shonibare MBE

Nigerian-raised, UK-based fine artist Yinka Shonibare MBE is one of the pioneers of a generation of post-colonial creators who draw on both the symbolic and very real — often violent — legacies of the past, as well as contemporary realities, to make complex, tactile work that is at once engaging and unsettling. His output — which often reframes art-historical moments — encompasses many mediums and inhabits different spaces (he created the Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle for the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square in London), and he is widely known for his installations featuring bright African prints on Dutch wax fabric worn by headless mannequins. Here he explains how these seemingly anonymous forms address the exclusion of non-western, non-privileged perspectives and bodies from art, while also taking in issues of gender power dynamics in artistic representation.

GB How did the headless bodies series come about? YS I’m asking questions about conventional canons of art and the exclusion of non-western art. I wanted to use the now-iconic ways that bodies have been represented in western art to create a new tradition that challenges tradition at the same time.

GB Why are your figures always headless? YS Because they are designed as a working-class protest. In the French Revolution all the nobility lost their heads. Everything about the body is about power, particularly when you are talking about colonialism. I’m interested in the power struggles of the body during the colonial era, and how at that time the rich — and artists who were rich — were celebrating the body in over-the-top glory, while other bodies were being repressed.

GB Are you a political artist? YS I’m politically conscious, but I wouldn’t say I’m a political artist.

GB Women’s bodies seem to feature in your work more regularly than those of men. Why is this? YS In the late 1980s it was very hard for artists to represent the female body in a positive way. It’s changed now, to some extent. I was coming up as an artist at that time, so it was the first exposure to the art world I really saw. I wanted to challenge that and ask a question about the difficulties faced in creating images of the female body in art. The way the body is being presented in art is changing, but, of course, there can always be more change.

Q&A taken from: PLAY WITH ME: DOLLS, WOMEN & ART by GRACE BANKS, published by LAURENCE KING. Image credit © YINKA SHONIBARE MBE. All rights reserved DACS / ARTIMAGE 2018. Image courtesy JAMES COHAN GALLERY. Photo STEPHEN WHITE.