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Yinka Shonibare MBE is, perhaps, best known as the dancing master of elaborate, balletic ensembles of headless mannequins who, in different historic and symbolic tableaux, seem frozen between the eighteenth century, as denoted by the style of their clothes, and a timeless, colonial and postcolonial Africa, as signified by the British, or Dutch, wax resist-dyed cloth out of which these clothes are fabricated. A facet of the economic colonialism that continues to the present - just like the imperialist network of transcontinental air routes that still impede contemporary travel in Africa - this foreign cloth is thought to be typical of 'Africa' and African taste...

... Shonibare has invented his own 'Theatre of the World' in which, intermittently, he struts across the stage as both manager and actor. Some of the acts within this, like Scramble for Africa, 2003, refer to specific historical moments - in this case the partition of Africa at the Congress of Berlin in 1884-85. Others are more generically expressive of the conditions and attitudes that, in the artist's opinion, led to colonisation and exploitation, in addition to continuing inequity and racism.

In these works the characters rarely have heads, a passing, humorous reference to the demise of the ancien r´gime in the guillotine-induced terror of the French Revolution, as well as to the vacuum of human sensibility that gave rise to the slavery and imperial adventures upon which so much of the wealth of the West had been based.  When heads appear, they tend to be either hidden, as in The sleep of reason produces monsters, 2008, or the artist's own, as in the series of photo panels Diary of a Victorian dandy, 1998, Dorian Gray, 2001, or in his more recent, operatic film about masquerade and regicide, Un ballo in maschera (A masked ball), 2004. Indeed Shonibare would appear to be a man of many masks and, in his obsessive celebration of the decadent endgame of commedia dell'arte, also glancingly refers to the masked figures and masquerades of traditional West African festivities and ritual.

... Shonibare's comedies of masks and manners are neither a denunciation of the past, nor a manifesto about the present. In thinking about and looking at his own situation, as well as that of Africa, he is prepared to countenance his own - and by extension other Africans' - complicity in its history. By being colonised, even unwillingly, they inevitably became part of the colonial system, and could benefit as well as lose from their handling of this transaction. Such a realisation lies behind the incorporation of his MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire), a somewhat anachronistic award bestowed by the Queen, as an integral part of his artistic and public persona.

No one has the possibility of turning back the clock, although some would like to. The most that can be realistically hoped for is the possibility of apprehending the different forces and interests that have molded the past, to ascertain how these may have influenced our own viewpoints. One of the strategies that Shonibare employs in doing this is the refashioning of famous works from the history of music, art and literature to suit his own ends...

This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the entire article in Art & Australia's Summer 2008 issue.