Yinka Shonibare Is A Guy Who Makes Art And We Were Skeptical But Things Could Change

Last year sometime we went to London. And while we were there we went to the Tate and saw the Turner Prize 2004 exhibition. The winner was, surprisingly to us, Yinka Shonibare. Born in London and raised in Nigeria, Shonibare‘s work (sculptures, films that he calls sculptures, etc) uses batik cloth and colonial references to discuss and consider and ponder personal and political histories, conflation thereof. The Swing (after Fragonard) was cool, but the big one, Un Ballo de Maschera, a film depicting the murder of King Gustav III of Sweden in all sorts of danc-y fantastic-ness was so godawfully boring