Yinka Shonibare, MBE
Rachel Kent. Time and Transformation in the Art of Yinka Shonibare MBE
Writers on Shonibare’s art have so far paid little attention to its ‘cinematic’ aspects. They bear further examination here, particularly in light of his recent film works which tease out the relationship between still and moving art forms. Extending the range of his practice, Shonibare made his first film, inspired by the 1792 assassination of the Swedish King Gustav III at a masked ball in Stockholm. An elaborate costume drama featuring performers in Dutch wax ball gowns, frocks coats and ornate Venetian-style masks, Shonibare’s film represents his most technically complex project to date. Aristocracy and play, frivolity and excess are themes within the film, which takes its title from Verdi’s opera on the same subject. Un Ballo in Maschera is followed by a second film, Odile and Odette (2005), a considerably more pared-back production featuring two ballerinas who face each other on either side of a gilded frame. Their graceful movements mirror one another as though they are a single body in reflection, a notion that is disrupted only by the contrasting colours of the women’s skin.
Odile and Odette is inspired by Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake, which premiered in Moscow in 1877. In the ballet the princess Odette has been cursed by an evil sorcerer, von Rothbart, to live as a swan by day and as a woman by night. Rothbart disguises his daughter Odile to resemble Odette, except that she wears black instead of white, and Prince Siegfried mistakenly swears to marry her, leading to tragedy for Odette and Siegfried. In the ballet, the roles of Odile and Odette are traditionally performed by one ballerina with two costumes. Shonibare’s interpretation extends the theme of blackness and whiteness in his juxtaposition of the two dancers, and calls into question the western binary opposition in which negative or ‘dark’ forces are polarised against positive, ‘light’ ones.
Shonibare’s recent incorporation of film within his oeuvre marks a turning point for the artist. Moving between static and time-based art forms, he explores the idea of film as a ‘moving tableau’ or animated painting with its luminous surfaces, sumptuous attention to detail, and strong compositional effects. The link between Shonibare’s photography and film is equally strong, shifting between colour and black and white, and the notion of the film-still versus the moving tableau. Narrative is a central concern for Shonibare, introduced by the diaristic format and titling of his Victorian Dandy photographs and the sequential, cinematic presentation of his Dorian Gray images. Further themes of inversion and doubting figure strongly as illustrated by the cyclical, looped format of Shonibare’s films: King Gustav III for example, gets up to dance once more after being assassinated. Shonibare has expressed his interest in film and narrative structures in a detailed interview within his publication, noting, ‘I did not want to make a film with a beginning, middle and end; instead I wanted to explore the reflexivity of the film and how it reflects back on itself.’ Speaking of Un Ballo in Maschera, he could equally have been referring to Odile and Odette with its literal mirroring of form and content. Shonibare cites French New Wave directors including Alain Resnais and Jean-Luc Godard as significant. Akira Kurosawa’s cinematic masterpiece Rashomon (1950), with its self-referential structure and altering four perspectives on one story, might offer another interesting counterpoint. In the film a brutal rape and murder in ancient Japan is replayed through the eyes of a bandit, a samurai and his wife, and a woodcutter. One character is the crime’s perpetrator, one is its witness, and two are its apparent victims: yet each account varies greatly and the truth remains indistinct. Key themes for Shonibare, ambiguity and contradiction are central to the film as is its non-linear, story within-a-story format. Truth and fiction are cross-examined as they are in Shonibare’s art, and ‘history’ itself is ultimately revealed as a malleable construction.
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Yinka Shonibere, MBE is presented at Kaunas Biennial by the partner James Cohan Gallery, New York /Shanghai
http://www.jamescohan.com/artists/yinka-shonibare-mbe/
