Yinka Shonibare and the Case for Nigeria at the Venice Biennale

Nigerians might be markedly less surprised than global commentators about the rave reviews. Nigeria has always seemed to occupy an outsized place in the cultural economy, producing innumerable icons and works of note. Big shoes for any curator to fill. But Aindrea Emelife’s pavilion, Nigeria Imaginary, has proven to meet the task and perhaps surpassed it. For the 60th Venice Biennale, Emelife is asking questions about Nigeria’s potential future. Nigeria Imaginary is positioned, she says, as a constellation of ‘a multitude of ideas, memories and nostalgias of the country boosted by a deserved criticality to enable dreaming.’ In an interview with The Republic’s editor-in-chief, Wale Lawal, Emelife explains that many of the artists featured ‘take moments from history as starting points, sitting within these imagined pasts to consider new configurations of both the past and the present.’

For the pavilion, Emelife selected eight artists, only one of whom currently resides in Nigeria. Forecasting raised eyebrows at this choice, Emelife, a young Black woman in the art industry—a positionality that Western institutions have routinely been criticized for underrating—issued a pre-emptive explanation. Speaking to the New York Times, she highlights migration and leaving as integral parts of the Nigerian experience: ‘People are always leaving, and that’s important to articulate with presenting Nigeria as a place.’ Against the backdrop of today’s ongoing Japa wave, this is increasingly true. There is perhaps also a more pragmatic curatorial reason for this. Adriano Pedrosa, curator of this year’s Biennale, has noted that his Biennale is one for artists who are themselves foreigners, immigrants, expatriates, diaspora, émigrés, and refugees, as well as those who are outsiders in other senses. In choosing to have some of the Nigerian pavilion’s contributors be of the diaspora. Emelife nods to this overarching vision while positioning Nigerian art as necessarily transnational and potentially even post-national—that is if we think of the nation only in essentialist terms.

Among the eight artists in Nigeria’s pavilion, the choice of Yinka Shonibare CBE RA points sharply to a different way of conceptualizing the national imaginary and the aesthetic choices that might represent it. Shonibare is strikingly diasporic, an artist who is constantly moving between Nigeria and elsewhere. The British-Nigerian, Nigerian-British artist was born in London and moved back to Lagos with his family where he spent the entirety of his childhood. Other than his summer holidays, he would not return to London until he was 17, to resume his art education at the Byam Shaw School of Art and later Goldsmith’s. At 18, he contracted transverse myelitis, a disorder caused by inflammation of the spinal cord which has resulted in the long-term paralysis of one side of his body. In a 2013 Guardian article, he notes ‘I had no movement at all from the neck down, so I had to work very hard to trick my brain into making parts of my body work. I still have residual paralysis and I use a wheelchair.’ Across many interviews, he notes that he has never wanted his disability to serve as a barrier to his art practice. A quick read through his long and accomplished CV proves it has not.

A superficial reading of Shonibare’s biography might suggest an irresolute placelessness: born in London, raised in Lagos, works now across multiple major cities in the West, but with strong present-day links to Nigeria. However, Paul Gilroy’s emphasis of routes as opposed to roots in his widely read The Black Atlantic, opens a different geographical front and way of understanding place. Gilroy’s work notably rejects essentialist constructions of identity that attempt to locate Blackness in fixed and unmoving time-spaces. Gilroy instead seeks to trace Black cultural formation through hybridity and creolization across and through the triangle that represents the slave trade routes, from West Africa, to Europe, and on to the ‘New World’. Through Gilroy’s work, we might understand the Black body as borderless.

The 2018 Pitzhanger lecture puts Shonibare and Gilroy in direct conversation. The three-part lecture features many rich contributions worth probing, one of which is Shonibare’s experiential encounter with ‘double consciousness’, a concept Gilroy borrows from W.E.B. Du Bois. Speaking about the challenges of identity as a Black artist creating in an anti-Black world, he pithily observes, ‘It occurred to me that if you made work about being Black you would be the Black artist who makes work about being Black, but if you didn’t make work about being Black you would be the Black artist who doesn’t make work about being Black.’

Shonibare’s realization here is one that feels almost universal to the Black cultural worker experience. It is, however, also quite specific to him. While studying at Byam Shaw, Shonibare was confronted by his white British tutor. A New York Times article describes the encounter in Shonibare’s words. ‘Why are you making work about Perestroika,’ Shonibare had been asked. ‘Why don’t you make authentic African art?’ Shonibare was at first perplexed. What did authenticity mean? What would it look like?