[ YINKA SHONIBARE ] Odile and Odette is based on Swan Lake.
The white swan is trying to get married to the prince.
And the black swan is the magician's daughter,
who is trying to take the place of the white swan.
What i've done with "Odile and Odette"
is to blur the boundaries between the baddie and the good one.
I've made them into one person.
They are one, but they're different.
And that's kind of what that film is about.
I've always enjoyed using beauty and seduction as a way of engaging people with the work.
My figures actually are of mixed race. They're neither White nor Black,
and they don't have any kind of facial features
that would make you identify them racially.
It's also a device that manages to make the pieces post-racial.
It's also a joke about the French Revolution,
when the aristocracy had their heads guillotined.
I'm very fascinated by class in my work.
And I like the idea of parodying or mimicking
the notion of class.
My lineage within the Nigerian context is quite aristocratic.
My great-great-grandfather was a Nigerian chief.
My father is a lawyer.
So I grew up, really, in a fairly affluent situation.
Because I didn't grow up
feeling inferior to anyone, you know, so I couldn't quite
understand the hierarchy of race in this country,
because it was somewhat sort of alien to me.
Although the fabrics are associated with Africa,
they have their origins in Indonesia.
The Dutch started to produce the fabrics
industrially for the Indonesian markets,
I guess, towards the end of the 19th century.
The industrially produced versions are not so popular in Indonesia.
So they tried West Africa.
I like the fact that the fabrics are multilayered.
They have this interesting history that goes back to Indonesia.
And then they're appropriated
by Africa and now represent African identities.
Things are not always what they seem.
And, you know, so—
and I sort of enjoy working— working with that.
Did you just see the front of "The Economist"?
"World on the edge".
I'm interested in the architects of the present economic disaster.
So um...
And so I wanna dedicate a drawing to Ben Bernanke
and Paulson
and Milton Friedman.
The drawings actually also started as a result
of issues around climate change.
Climate really is more for me about the zeitgeist, you know, trying to capture
the climate of the moment.
There are times when I do really kind of objective things. I take things out of magazines
or newspapers.
But then I do intuitive things alongside that.
Well, this is my return to drawing in 12 years.
'Cause a lot of my work to date is in mainly painting, sculpture,
photography, and film.
I kind of wanted to go back to basics, just do some more
intimate things.
I've decided to use flowers as the starting point.
And then against the financial side,
literally just use pages from the "Financial Times".
Those are cut out into flower shapes.
And then those are combined with the fabrics,
the batik that I use in my work.
Those are also cut into flowers.
So it's a juxtaposition, if you like,
of nature and culture
and just trying to see if the drawings can become more than the contents.
It would be nice to have more "Financial Times" flowers,
but like different sizes,
maybe like you did in there.
- Okay. - You know?
[ both chuckle ]
- People often ask me,
you know how much work does Yinka actually do?
He's quite a conceptual artist And for, you know, centuries,
people haven't always made their own work, physically.
There always have been teams of people that work on them.
Working with Yinka, it's quite a creative process.
To be able to adapt the ideas that he has
and insert your own ideas. And he allows for that.
The show in Sydney was the first retrospective of its kind.
It was a survey of 12 years of Yinka's work.
So it was really interesting to see all these works
side by side that had never been pulled together
for many, many years.
and really interesting to take a look at the works from today's context
and where the work today is going.
[ indistinct background chatter ]
- "Black Gold" is about oil.
Literally like a sort of oil splash on the wall.
I was thinking about oil being black gold,
because it's becoming a rare commodity.
I was also thinking particularly about the oil in Nigeria.
Western companies have just totally destroyed
the flora and fauna of the area,
and the rivers are full of oil, gunk,
and it's just too sad, you know?
It's just horrible.
"Scramble for Africa" is based on a conference that was held in Berlin
in 1884 to 1885.
The European countries came together to divide up africa to decide who would have
which trading area.
And so I re-imagined it with these brainless men sitting around the table,
literally brainless.
And they're having this meeting and deciding the fate of Africa.
When i was 19, I got a virus in my spine,
which left me completely paralyzed.
I've been gradually recovering from that.
- Yeah, we good with that?
- Do you want to get rid of it?
"Dorian Gray" is probably the point at which I first
talked about the ideas of disability in my work.
I put myself in the series as Dorian Gray.
I was thinking more about my own mortality.
And my own internal conflicts
with various kind of moral issues, personal issues.
And the difficulty of living with my own body.
Difficulty in relation to my own kind of vanity as well.
When i wanted to work with photography,
it was obvious that i would use myself because,
you know, unfortunately, I am concerned with myself or, you know—
I'm kind of self-obsessed, like most artists.
And you know, so naturally, I started working with myself
and using my own body to sort of express
what i'm trying to express.
I did "Diary of a Victorian Dandy".
That piece is loosely based on Hogarth's "A Rake's Progress"
It's really about complicity with excess.
Power creates excess.
And what's my relation to excess, and how do I play with that?
Of course, I could choose to point a finger at it,
but, you know, I also actually would like to have the trappings
of wealth myself,
even though I may be criticizing it.
- Do you know what I mean?
So you have to get that feeling, give the feeling
that there is light coming from outside.
- Right.
- Seeing the early pieces, I can see the journey that I've made to arrive
at the later pieces.
And it starts to become clearer how I actually moved from painting to costumes.
And then to photography.
And then to moving image.
You know it seems kind of logical how that would happen.
"Un Ballo in Maschera" was one of the most exhausting things
I've ever done in my life.
I had to learn fast. It was my first film.
I had to go from auditioning the dancers to designing the costumes,
to doing the storyboards for the film.
Then working with a cinematographer.
I mean, I didn't even know what Steadicam was.
I found out.
And I worked with a choreographer
called Lisa Toren who is Swedish.
The Swedish King Gustav III was fighting wars in Russia
and Denmark and his people were starving.
He loved the lavish lifestyle
And he had this fondness for masked balls.
There was a plot to kill him at the ball.
[ gunshot fires ]
I always imagined I was a very strong political republican.
Republican is anti-monarchy in Europe
so it means that you don't
like the hereditary system of kings and queens.
Member of the Order of the British Empire is an award of merit
given for services to any discipline, really,
you know, from science to
engineering, to charities, to the arts,
and I was given this award for services to the arts.
What I find ironic about it is that actually my work all along has been a critique of empire.
So my artist's name now is Yinka Shonibare MBE,
so Member of the Order of the British Empire.
[ chuckles ]
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