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Lot Essay
‘MOWAA is an organisation that will restore the dignity of Nigerian heritage and international dialogue. I feel it is imperative to support the Nigeria Pavilion in Venice auction in order to broaden and enrich the global community of the Venice Biennale’ (Yinka Shonibare)
Christie’s and the Museum of West African Art (MOWAA) in Nigeria are collaborating to raise funds for MOWAA and its initiatives to create a cultural ecosystem in Benin City, based on the art of the past, present and future. A number of artists have generously agreed to donate original works of art to the auction, including Yinka Shonibare, Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, Lakwena Maciver and Victor Ehikhamenor. Proceeds from the sale of the works will go towards MOWAA initiatives including the presentation of the Nigeria Pavilion at La Biennale di Venezia, 2024—commissioned by the Governor of Edo State and also curated by Aindrea Emelife—and the 20-acre Creative Campus, including the Rainforest Gallery. Designed by the Dakar-based architecture firm Worofila, the Rainforest Gallery will be dedicated to showcasing Modern and Contemporary art, as well as historic exhibitions.
Flower Kid (Girl) (2022) is an instantly recognisable sculpture by Yinka Shonibare. Growing up between London and Lagos, Shonibare is renowned for meshing together British and African visual motifs in his works. Teeming with contradictions, irony and theatricality, they have gained a reputation for highlighting the cultural hybridity and complexity brought about by globalisation. In the present work we see a child, arms outstretched, holding a bouquet of flowers. Caught mid-motion, she appears endearingly human—and yet her head has been replaced with a globe. She sports a vibrant blue batik dress, and equally striking yellow stockings. These various motifs cleverly bring together cultural, political and ecological concerns in a way which is both charismatic and visually appealing. While freighted with prescient, thought-provoking themes, the work is underpinned by a fundamental warmth and sense of play.
Shonibare’s signature batik fabric—which he began using in the 1990s, and typically sources from Brixton Market in South London—is rich in significance. Often perceived as traditionally African, the textile actually derives from Indonesia, via the Netherlands and Manchester. Shonibare emphasises the farcical idea of the fabric being seen as a signifier of his African heritage: instead it is more revealing of the complex and culturally tangled fallout of our colonial past. Indeed, he exposes and undermines the expectation put on African creatives to produce work which overtly relates to African culture. He relates the batik to discourses surrounding Afrocentrism: a term used to describe the African diaspora’s adoption of certain cultural wares, motifs and artistic outputs—which hold limited African provenance, but have come to be considered as intrinsically African—as a way to connect with a distant home. Shonibare encourages us to question our tendency to silo cultural outputs, and to consider the ways that we confine artists to narrow conceptions of their background.
The globe-head of Flower Kid (Girl) is also a recurrent motif within Shonibare’s oeuvre, and there is an arsenal of meanings behind this creative choice. The present work makes specific reference to the environmental peril of global warming. The globe is printed with an astrological map, where the names of endangered flower species, also represented within the bouquet, replace the names of the constellations. The threat to nature is here given cosmic importance. The figure’s hands gesticulate as if to ask the viewer ‘Why?’: how did we get here, and what are we going to do about it? The urgency of this question is exacerbated by the work’s title. The figure is only a ‘Kid’, their future a mist of uncertainty and anxiety. Shonibare’s variously headless figures have also been perceived as a riposte to Thomas Hobbes’s theories surrounding the body politic, in which the powerful head of state predominates over the rest of the nation, and also a play on Yoruba traditional thinking which posits the head as ‘the seat of the soul’. Shonibare’s sculptural practice is preoccupied with gesture. Often capturing his subjects in instances of small and rapid movement, which reveal more about a subject than any preconfigured position, Shonibare stages revealing, unguarded vignettes of human experience. The present work’s freeze-frame composition attests to as much: the subject draws us into embrace, but also into conversation, evincing Shonibare’s unique ability to produce works which appear as storytellers, alive and breathing.
Christie’s and the Museum of West African Art (MOWAA) in Nigeria are collaborating to raise funds for MOWAA and its initiatives to create a cultural ecosystem in Benin City, based on the art of the past, present and future. A number of artists have generously agreed to donate original works of art to the auction, including Yinka Shonibare, Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, Lakwena Maciver and Victor Ehikhamenor. Proceeds from the sale of the works will go towards MOWAA initiatives including the presentation of the Nigeria Pavilion at La Biennale di Venezia, 2024—commissioned by the Governor of Edo State and also curated by Aindrea Emelife—and the 20-acre Creative Campus, including the Rainforest Gallery. Designed by the Dakar-based architecture firm Worofila, the Rainforest Gallery will be dedicated to showcasing Modern and Contemporary art, as well as historic exhibitions.
Flower Kid (Girl) (2022) is an instantly recognisable sculpture by Yinka Shonibare. Growing up between London and Lagos, Shonibare is renowned for meshing together British and African visual motifs in his works. Teeming with contradictions, irony and theatricality, they have gained a reputation for highlighting the cultural hybridity and complexity brought about by globalisation. In the present work we see a child, arms outstretched, holding a bouquet of flowers. Caught mid-motion, she appears endearingly human—and yet her head has been replaced with a globe. She sports a vibrant blue batik dress, and equally striking yellow stockings. These various motifs cleverly bring together cultural, political and ecological concerns in a way which is both charismatic and visually appealing. While freighted with prescient, thought-provoking themes, the work is underpinned by a fundamental warmth and sense of play.
Shonibare’s signature batik fabric—which he began using in the 1990s, and typically sources from Brixton Market in South London—is rich in significance. Often perceived as traditionally African, the textile actually derives from Indonesia, via the Netherlands and Manchester. Shonibare emphasises the farcical idea of the fabric being seen as a signifier of his African heritage: instead it is more revealing of the complex and culturally tangled fallout of our colonial past. Indeed, he exposes and undermines the expectation put on African creatives to produce work which overtly relates to African culture. He relates the batik to discourses surrounding Afrocentrism: a term used to describe the African diaspora’s adoption of certain cultural wares, motifs and artistic outputs—which hold limited African provenance, but have come to be considered as intrinsically African—as a way to connect with a distant home. Shonibare encourages us to question our tendency to silo cultural outputs, and to consider the ways that we confine artists to narrow conceptions of their background.
The globe-head of Flower Kid (Girl) is also a recurrent motif within Shonibare’s oeuvre, and there is an arsenal of meanings behind this creative choice. The present work makes specific reference to the environmental peril of global warming. The globe is printed with an astrological map, where the names of endangered flower species, also represented within the bouquet, replace the names of the constellations. The threat to nature is here given cosmic importance. The figure’s hands gesticulate as if to ask the viewer ‘Why?’: how did we get here, and what are we going to do about it? The urgency of this question is exacerbated by the work’s title. The figure is only a ‘Kid’, their future a mist of uncertainty and anxiety. Shonibare’s variously headless figures have also been perceived as a riposte to Thomas Hobbes’s theories surrounding the body politic, in which the powerful head of state predominates over the rest of the nation, and also a play on Yoruba traditional thinking which posits the head as ‘the seat of the soul’. Shonibare’s sculptural practice is preoccupied with gesture. Often capturing his subjects in instances of small and rapid movement, which reveal more about a subject than any preconfigured position, Shonibare stages revealing, unguarded vignettes of human experience. The present work’s freeze-frame composition attests to as much: the subject draws us into embrace, but also into conversation, evincing Shonibare’s unique ability to produce works which appear as storytellers, alive and breathing.