Crossing Borders / Artist Interview / Yinka Shonibare / Biography

Artist Biography

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Yinka Shonibare

Yinka Shonibare was born in London in 1962 and grew up in the UK and Nigeria. In the 1980s he studied in London at the Byam Shaw School of Art and graduated from Goldsmiths College in 1991. Concerned with cultural hybridity and the construction of identity, Shonibare's videos, photographs and installations playfully mix up cultural and historical signifiers to blur boundaries between class and ethnicity, high and low art and coloniser-colonised relationships. Since the 1990s Shonibare has exhibited internationally extensively, including the Venice Biennale, 2001, and Documenta 11, Kassel, in 2002. In 2004 he was nominated for the Turner Prize. Yinka Shonibare is represented by Stephen Friedman Gallery, London; and James Cohan Gallery, New York.


Interview of Yinka Shonibare