Yinka Shonibare

Yinka Shonibare (born February 10, 1962, London, England) is a British artist of Nigerian heritage known for his examination of such ideas as authenticity, identity, colonialism, and power relations in often-ironic drawings, paintings, sculptures, photographs, films, and installations. A signature element of his work is his use of so-called Dutch wax-printed fabric, produced by means of a batiklike technique. Exported from the Netherlands and elsewhere in Europe in the late 19th century, the brightly-colored patterned fabric was meant to imitate Indonesian cloth and was enthusiastically adopted in West Africa, so this inauthentic Indonesian textile produced in Europe became known as “African” cloth.