nothin Dead Man’s Chest | New Haven Independent

Dead Man’s Chest

Yinka Shonibare, “Fake Death Picture,” now on display.

Inside a gallery on Chapel Street, there’s a dead man draped on a bed in a dark room, a bottle of poison on the floor near his limp hand. Shredded papers spill from a box nearby.

There’s also a dead man in another bed, this time a gun in his hand, the neat self-inflicted wound in his side.

Then there’s a man on the cusp of death, throwing himself off a cliff while stabbing himself.

It’s the same man every time, and he’s in the same outfit. The cut of the clothes is straight out of the historical British aristocracy. The patterns on the fabric the clothes are made of, however, are from somewhere else — not Britain, but almost certainly one of its former colonies.

The fake death pictures” are three pieces in a small but powerful exhibition of artist Yinka Shonibare MBE (RA) at the Yale Center for British Art on Chapel Street. The show runs until Dec. 11.

The British Nigerian Shonibare, who is among those at the top of the contemporary art game these days, uses sculpture, film, photography, and other installations to examine the legacy of colonialism, with a sharp eye and a keen sense of irony. The fabric and fabric patterns that show up in his work have become a trademark. Apart from being visually dazzling, as the text accompanying the display says, the fabrics are the product of global trade and point to the themes at the heart of this artist’s work.”

The exhibition at the Center for British Art was born from Shonibare’s interest in the famous British naval officer Admiral Lord Nelson, kindled after Shonibare was commissioned to create a sculpture to be installed in Trafalgar Square in the center of London. In the center of that square is a tall column with a statue of Nelson atop it; any other public art in the square would have to contend with it.

“Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle” in Trafalgar Square, 2010.

Depictions of Nelson, it turns out, are a good target for anticolonial sentiment. In 1966, Irish republicans bombed a similar statue of Nelson that the British had erected in Dublin. Shonibare’s 2010 Trafalgar Square installation, Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle,” eschews violence for sly humor, building a miniature of Nelson’s vessel, the HMS Victory, and turning it, as the title suggests, into a plaything.

But it’s not just a joke. That the sails are made from that global fabric gives a sardonic nod to the exploitative economic system that really powered Nelson’s ship when Britannia ruled the waves. Putting the ship in a bottle in the present day also makes a comment about how the empire itself has fallen; a force that shaped world history can be made into an antique-shop curio. But that makes you look pretty hard at the cork sealing the bottle shut. Can history be locked away like that? Or is some sort of pressure building inside the chamber, waiting to explode?

Also included in the exhibit are Nelson’s Jacket” and Fanny’s Dress” costumes Shonibare made that ended up in a 2011 film, Addio del Passato, that Shonibare created involving Nelson and his wife. Having the actual clothes in the exhibit, first, allows a sense of just how much work went into creating them. Apart from the simple aesthetic pleasure, the work itself is a comment on just how much the colonial project, and the exploitation of millions of people, was stitched into the fabric of the British Empire. Which makes the fake death pictures” go even deeper than it first appears.

All three pictures look back at colonialism with an unflinching eye. A particularly dark interpretation can suggest that colonialism itself was a kind of horrific homicidal-suicidal project, that the empire offed itself, but not before claiming countless victims.

But this only grim view of Shonibare’s work doesn’t really hold. There’s too much humor in it, too much wryness and irony, for that, and it makes the work richer. Yes, colonialism was an atrocious enterprise. But it means something that Shonibare can look back at the history of colonialism and regard the colonizers not with unvarnished fear or anger, but with mockery.

Another part of the text accompanying the exhibition argues that the rest of the museum, devoted to British art across the centuries, provide a rich context for considering the political and cultural resonances of Shonibare’s work.” This statement happens to be quite true. People who have been to the Center for British Art before may find the entire museum subtly changed if they visit Shonibare’s exhibition first.

The entire museum can be said to make an argument about the trajectory of the United Kingdom, as you move from portraits of aristocrats, pastoral English landscapes, and vivid scenes of naval battles (which will be highlighted in an upcoming exhibit, Spreading Canvas: Eighteenth-Century British Marine Painting,” which opens on Sept. 15), to vistas of countries and cities far from London, full of the energy of travel, to the fractured, abstract anxiety that seems to kick in right about the time the British Empire crumbles. That anxiety is in full force in Catherine Yass’s 2002 Descent: HQ5,” a photograph in a lightbox of blurred skyscrapers that suggest either that the viewer is plummeting to the ground, or perhaps that the entire city is in a frozen freefall, with no end in sight.

But all is not lost. In the next gallery over from Descent” is 2012’s Fly,” a series of etched portraits by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye of black men, each wearing the same feathered ruff, a soft collar around the neck, but each given their dignity, their own identity and humanity.

Where does Britain go now? The question is as relevant now as ever, as the country leaves the European Union and wrestles with the current and historical problems that presents. Shonibare’s work, with its clear eyes and ironic heart, casts all of that in a fresh light, suggesting that there is a way to move forward and account for the crimes of the past, without being fully weighed down by them.

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