Hello and welcome to The Long Wave. Earlier this month I was in Antananarivo, Madagascar, where I checked out the British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare’s first major solo exhibition in Africa. For this week’s newsletter I caught up with him about the landmark show, and learned a lot about the growing Malagasy art scene.
Madagascar is not a country that figures prominently in media – western or otherwise (beyond the children’s film) – and as such it was difficult to know what to expect. I hadn’t imagined an opportunity to visit, and so Fondation H’s invitation to the capital to explore the art scene felt once in a lifetime. It was certainly a long way to travel for an exhibition: from London, with a stopover in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the journey topped 15 hours, though as soon as I landed in Madagascar I was instantly taken by its lush, grassy plains and mountainous topography.
Arriving in Antananarivo, commonly referred to as Tana, is a visual feast, remarkable for its colour and vibrancy; the cityscape is defined by its rugged terrain, where houses of red, yellow, terracotta and turquoise resemble a hillside mosaic. At the heart of this beautiful city is the building of Fondation H, the Malagasy art foundation founded in 2017 to address the country’s lack of public modern art institutions, despite its reserve of creative talent. The building itself, a palace of red stones, was constructed under the French colonial administration but was renovated with old Malagasy techniques of tile-making, parquetry and carpentry.
Since opening its doors in 2023, Fondation H has hosted residencies and exhibitions from more than 30 African artists. And, as I learned on my trip, the foundation’s building welcomes 15,000 visitors a month, 90% of those being from Madagascar with a large proportion under the age of 25. This is a demographic composition that would be the envy of any art institution, particularly as galleries around the world fight to attract young, local audiences. In a country that lacks any big art schools, the foundation has presented a unique opportunity to invest in Malagasy youth through the organisation of training sessions and workshops, and provided a space for Malagasy artists to be judged by the international art market.
Authenticity and stereotyping
Fondation H’s latest guest is perhaps its most significant: the British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare was given carte blanche to occupy the 2,200-sq metre building with installations drawn from his catalogue of works. While Shonibare tells me that being in Madagascar for his first large solo exhibition in Africa feels symbolic, it is not his first attempt. He has exhibited solo shows in South Africa, and about 15 years ago the late Nigerian curator Bisi Silva, the founder of the Centre for Contemporary Art in Lagos, invited Shonibare to put on a major exhibition. However, the city’s infrastructure meant they could not find the right space for the scale of installations.
The most distinctive practice of Shonibare is his focus on materials – and his consistent use of Ankara print – African wax fabrics that he says capture the very essence of hybridities as a concept. “I like pushing the boundaries of my practice and using non-conventional materials,” he says. He also tells me that while at art school he was fascinated by Soviet art and created some works around perestroika, a political restructuring movement during the late stages of the USSR. One of Shonibare’s professors questioned why he wasn’t producing “authentic” African art, and it frustrated him as he finds that arts and textiles are fashioned through an assembly line of cross-cultural involvement rather than a singular source. With African wax prints, “they are Indonesian-influenced fabrics produced by the Dutch and sold to the African market. So the material itself does raise a number of questions about authenticity and stereotyping.”
The central attraction of Shonibare’s exhibition is his immersive installation The African Library, which contains about 6,000 books that are displayed in African wax prints. Created in 2018, the library is an archive of celebration of anticolonial revolutionary leaders, such as Nelson Mandela and Kwame Nkrumah, but also of musicians and sports stars of differing generations such as Margaret Singana, Smockey and Patrick Vieira. The intellectual project behind the library is to recalibrate our understanding of independence history and how African stories are still being written today.
It’s essential to retain history
At the exhibition, I am particularly struck by a print from his African Bird Magic series, which features two birds and an Idia mask, the traditional ivory mask of Idia, the first queen mother of the 16th-century Benin empire. Shonibare tells me that when he created this series he was “thinking about whether the African environment has been degraded through mining and industrialisation … and then thinking back to a precolonial period when Africans had a closer relationship with nature”. He was also thinking about “the possibility of birds being extinct because of what’s been done to the environment”.
The Idia mask was looted from Benin during the British punitive expedition of 1897, alongside other artefacts including the famed Benin bronzes. He tells me that the mask used in the print on display is the exact mask that the British Museum refused to loan Nigeria for Festac ’77 (the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture). “That mask then became the symbol for Festac. It’s very famous and iconic – some would even say it’s like Nigeria’s Mona Lisa.” Restitution remains a key motif in much of Shonibare’s work. For the Nigerian pavilion at last year’s Venice Biennale, he presented an installation crafted from clay that replicated 153 of the objects known to have been looted from Benin during the 1897 expedition.
Much of Shonibare’s art work furthers political commentary. In Fondation H, his installation Decolonised Structures features statues of Queen Victoria, the colonial administrator Earl Kitchener, and the British wartime prime minister Winston Churchill covered in African wax fabrics with their plinths reduced so they are closer to the ground. This was the artist’s response to discussions around the toppling of statues, such as of the enslaver Edward Colston in Bristol, England. “I don’t support statues being destroyed,” he says. “We can create conversations around them, we can move them to museums, but I think it’s essential to retain history and to retain memory.”
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A thriving Malagasy arts scene
Shonibare has also curated a display of works from 19 African and Afro-descendant artists drawn from the foundation’s collections. He selected artists who “push the boundaries of materials. There are artists like El Anatsui and Ibrahim Mahama, who really think about their local context and their works are usually derived from the materials they have at hand.”
Shonibare thinks about a “liberation through the use of materials” and one of the artists featured, a Malagasy artist called Temandrota, talks me through his work on display, which uses organic materials found in south-east Madagascar, where he hails, such as roots, sap and sisal. “This is art that speaks to experience. Very deep in the island, in the south, there is not much water. People are nomadic because of this as they have to go from one place to another to find food and water.” As such, the use of materials from the local environment replicates how groups of southern Malagasy people carry their cultures, textiles and rituals wherever they go. Temandrota also tells me that since the opening of Fondation H, his art – and the work of other Malagasy artists – has been “opened to the world” and provided a more secure premises for the artistic scene in Madagascar, which had previously been more loose and disjointed.
Shonibare’s nurturing of artists will continue through two projects in Nigeria: a more formal artistic space in Lagos and a rural working farm in Ijebu-Ode, Ogun state. Shonibare tells me that the idea of the farm, where local produce like cassava, yam, tomatoes, pawpaw and plantain are grown, is to “support food sustainability in Nigeria, support the local area, and support the work of artists who might want to make things around ecology”. Through the partnership, the Malagasy artist Joey Aresoa will begin a residency in Lagos this year. When I visit Aresoa in her studio, she talks me through a silver installation, a library of possibilities, building stories and filling absences in Malagasy-authored literature – a pursuit she intends to continue through the residency.
For Shonibare, his Guest Artists Space (GAS) foundation is about building the infrastructure to develop artistic careers on the continent, much like Fondation H. “For some diaspora artists, it has been quite emotional for them as it may be their first time in Nigeria or anywhere in Africa, and we have the infrastructure and framework to support this and to build links around the world. We have an essential role in supporting African and diaspora creatives, in giving them that platform and space.”
