On St-Jean-Baptiste Day, Quebec’s national holiday, it seemed oddly fitting to battle my way through throngs of tourists in the Old Port to check out Yinka Shonibare’s exhibition Pièces de résistance at DHC/ART. Almost without exception, Shonibare’s post-colonial themed work is visually sumptuous, and the anomalous combination of colourful and densely printed African textiles together with 18th Century European fashion and cultural references (art, opera, ballet) have formed the basis of his practice for over twenty years. 
Yinka Shonibare, Mr. and Mrs. Andrews without their Heads, 1998 (courtesy: DHC/ART, photo: Richard-Max Tremblay)
In this tightly curated survey of his practice by Cheryl Sim, most of the works date from the last ten years, but older ones, such as Mr. and Mrs. Andrews without their Heads from 1998, are also included. Many of the sculptural works and photographs are generated from art historical references: the above mentioned Mr. and Mrs. Andrews by Gainsborough, Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa, Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, a series based on famous death paintings, and, feeling rather out of place, Andy Warhol’s Camouflage. The strange, spindly, dismembered nature of Shonibare's culturally mashed up figurative sculpture is intriguing, but I found the staged photographs – faithfully recreated from original paintings – less so. His videos are his most successful endeavor. Working from opera and dance, they hold all the graphic and formal beauty of his sculptures, but further elaborate and complicate through movement, sound, and repetition. They are weirder and more haunting.
Surprisingly this is Shonibare’s first solo exhibition in Canada. That it is happening in Quebec, a nation with a complicated colonial history and relationship with post-colonial waves of immigration, makes this exhibition all the more relevant and pertinent to contemplate.
DHC/ART Foundation for Contemporary Art: http://dhc-art.org/
Yinka Shonibare MBE: Pièces de résistance continues until September 20.
Susannah Wesley is an artist and curator living in Montreal. She has been a member of the collaborative duo Leisure since 2004 and from 1997-2000 was part of the notorious British art collective the Leeds13. Formerly Director at Battat Contemporary in Montreal, she holds an MFA from the Glasgow School of Art and an MA in Art History from Concordia University. She is Akimblog's Montreal correspondent and can be followed @susannahwesley1 on Twitter.
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Yinka Shonibare at DHC/ART, Montreal
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