Special:
Free admission to the exhibition with your ImPulsTanz-Ticket!
An English lady strolls through the room with three ocelots on leashes; under a suspended coach, a troop of young aristocrats orgiastically gorge themselves at a picnic; a countess swinging under a tree slips her shoe towards us. Exotic and vibrantly colored fabrics are tailored to make the garments for these characters, who are from a time between the ancien regime and Victorian ages. And like many showcase mannequins, all are without heads.
Three main ingredients in Yinka Shonibare?s often larger-than-life installations and photographic narratives are: the exotic, the erotic, and history. Precisely sorted and recombined, the London artist, raised in Nigeria, asks, as it were, playful question about cultural identity, the legacy of the colonial past, and the credibility of typical characteristics of a colture, for example, the actual origins of the ?African? fabrics. The language that seems quite clear and understandable on the surface often turns out to be ?double dutch? – incomprehensible.
Yinka Shonibare’s installation “Gallantry and Criminal Conversation” (2002) numbers among the most remarkable contributions to documenta 11.
The exhibition in the Kunsthalle Wien, organized and curated in collaboration with the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen Rotterdam, is Yinka Shonibare’s first major solo exhibition in a German-speaking country.
Curators: Jaap Guldemund, Gabriele Mackert, Lucas Gehrmann
Guided tours: every Sunday 3 pm