Serpentine Gallery, London
From colonial leaders dressed in trippy patterns to a library of historical conflicts, this delightful show brings a welcome wit and rationality to today’s angry debates
It looks like a happy ending. After the disputes and all the agonising, Yinka Shonibare CBE offers a witty, weirdly beautiful conclusion to the debate over public statues that has raged since Edward Colston was toppled in Bristol four years ago. Except I don’t think Shonibare is interested in conclusions.
Queen Victoria, Winston Churchill, Kitchener – they’re all here, a gallery of famous and less famous icons of Britain’s imperial past. Their statues from public places in the capital have been reproduced, not monumental size but human height. They have also been removed from their plinths and brought down to earth. And each statue has been covered in the bright multicoloured Dutch wax prints that are Shonibare’s multicultural pop art trademark. These ravishing textiles, made in the Netherlands (and at one time Manchester) to sell in Africa since the 19th century and still doing a roaring trade, symbolise in Shonibare’s work the inauthenticity and complexity of culture and identity in a globalised capitalist world. Now they turn patriotic statues into something new and unimaginable to the dead people they represent.
