End of Empire

For this commission, Yinka Shonibare CBE, one of the UK’s leading artists, explored how the new alliances forged in the First World War changed British society forever and continue to have an impact.

Shonibare’s work featured two of his signature figures attired in African fabrics, their globe-heads highlighting the countries involved in WW1. Offering a metaphor for dialogue, balance and conflict, the entire work pivoted almost imperceptibly in the gallery space, symbolising the possibility of compromise and resolution between two opposing forces.

How has immigration contributed to the British culture in which we live today? How have immigrants shaped what it means to be British? These are the questions Shonibare asked in The British Library, a sculptural work presented alongside End of Empire at Turner Contemporary. Shelves of books, many bearing the name of an immigrant who has enriched our society (from TS Eliot to Zaha Hadid), reminded us that the displacement of communities by global war has consequences that inform our lives and attitudes today.

Following this presentation this work was acquired jointly by Wolverhampton Art Gallery and Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, with support from the Art Fund.

About the artist
Yinka Shonibare CBE was born in 1962 in London and moved to Lagos, Nigeria at the age of three. He returned to London to study Fine Art, first at Byam School of Art (now Central Saint Martins College) and then at Goldsmiths College, where he received his MFA.

Shonibare’s work explores issues of race and class through the media of painting, sculpture, photography and film. Shonibare questions the meaning of cultural and national definitions. His trademark material is the brightly coloured ‘African’ batik fabric he buys in London. This type of fabric was inspired by Indonesian design, mass-produced by the Dutch and eventually sold to the colonies in West Africa. In the 1960s the material became a new sign of African identity and independence.

Shonibare was a Turner prize nominee in 2004, and was also awarded the decoration of Member of the ‘Most Excellent Order of the British Empire’ or MBE, a title he has added to his professional name. Shonibare was notably commissioned by Okwui Enwezor at Documenta 11, Kassel, in 2002 to create his most recognised work ‘Gallantry and Criminal Conversation’ that launched him on to an international stage. He has exhibited at the Venice Biennale and internationally at leading museums. In September 2008, his major mid-career survey commenced at the MCA Sydney and then toured to the Brooklyn Museum, New York and the Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC. He was elected as a Royal Academician by the Royal Academy, London in 2013.

Co-commissioned by 14-18 NOW and Turner Contemporary