The title alludes to the Berlin conference of 1874 at which Africa was divided up among five European countries, with representatives of other Western nations as witnesses.
Mr. Shonibare reimagines the event using headless mannequins ranged around a table on which a map of Africa is painted. Each figure is dressed in 19th-century European style, but the clothes are made from the vividly patterned fabrics that are this artist's signature. Usually taken to be quintessentially African, such cloth was actually designed in Dutch Indonesia, manufactured in England and finally exported to Africa for sale.
For Mr. Shonibare, the hybrid material acts as a prism for breaking up a view of the world built on value-laden absolutes: white-black; civilized-savage; Western-African; victor-victim. And the clothes' transnational history echoes the artist's: born in London, he grew up in Nigeria and now makes London his home. He regularly appears in surveys of global art but also in culturally specific exhibitions like "Transforming the Crown: African, Asian and Caribbean Artists in Britain, 1966-96," seen in New York in 1997, and this contemporary African show.
I suspect that he and certain other young artists in "Looking Both Ways" regard themselves far less as disinherited ex-natives of Africa, or anywhere else, than as world citizens with manifold allegiances and preferences. The directions they face are neither strictly binary nor linear: the view is not backward and forward as much as from side to side and all around. Such flexible positioning can be used assertively or defensively: to enrich creativity or to nail down a career in a Western market that still demands exoticism and racial or ethnic authenticity in its non-Western participants.
| There's the rest of Holland Cotter's New York Times art review "Redefining the African Diaspora" to consider, too
posted in articles on November 21, 2003 3:49 AM | t (0)
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