Discobolus (after Naukydes), 2017.

Globe Heads, World Views and Aliens

Ever since the late 1990s, Shonibare had been employing exceptionally well-dressed, but headless mannequins to both celebrate and satirise the gallantries, excesses, duels and bucolic leisure activities, in short, the decadent and sumptuous lifestyle of polite society or, alternatively, the quest for knowledge of Europe's educated classes. As guillotined or headless bodies, the figures are robbed of their individuality, more illusion than reality, their skin colour ambiguous—they are bearers of cultural patterns, instruments of deception, objects of desire and reflect historical experiences and power relations.

More recently, a keen interest in cartography and globes has been evident in Shonibare's work. In his reconfigurations of classical sculptures, again featuring the typical Dutch wax batik design, the heads have been replaced with hand-coloured globes. Through this critical gesture in the beautiful guise of classical aesthetics, Shonibare calls for historical multi-perspectivity and a rethinking of space, mobility and cultural identity. The binary division of the world into "we" and "the others", East and West, First and Third World is, after all, based on strict rules of inclusion and exclusion. Moreover, the current geopolitical order is dynamic, and the present-day phrase "the Global South", as an orienting term for the non-hegemonic regions of this world, already represents a reordering of geography, at least in terms of societal and economic dynamics.

The World at the Time of the Surrealists, a surrealist world map published in the Belgian magazine Variétés in 1929, already depicted a world whose familiar contours have gone out of whack. In it certain countries and world regions gain significantly in size, while others have become infinitesimally small. The Soviet Union and China are among the winners, some regions, however, have increased tremendously in size, including the island world of the South Pacific which dominates the centre of the new world map. Alaska and Greenland as well as Mexico and Peru also appear significantly larger, whereas the British Isles have moved to the far western edge of the surreal world image and, shrunk to miniature size, appear smaller than the Hawaiian island chain in the Pacific. The USA have completely disappeared and all that is left of France is Paris, the capital of Surrealism. The playfully curving equatorial line may imply that the map not only counters European reason by offering a different topography, but also that a world of the unconscious, fantasy and imagination is entered. Of central importance, however, is the discrediting of the colonial powers expressed in this subversive map picture.

World images may be understood as a way of giving form to beliefs through which humans reassure themselves of their place in the world and the world as such. They are based on time- and culture-bound assumptions about the world and manifest themselves in world maps which, while indispensable as tools to visually communicate knowledge, invariably offer mere model-like representations of the earth and as planar projections visualize very different viewpoints and culturally determined perceptual conventions. Shonibare has applied his aesthetic concept of playful hybridity and sly, ironic reframing of cultural and visual stereotypes also to Christian imaginings of the world in the Latin Middle Ages. Commissioned to create work for Hereford Cathedral in West England, he engaged in an in-depth study of the medieval world map located there. The largest and most important surviving universal map of the Middle Ages, it was created for the cathedral around 1300 by Richard de Haldingham. The map is drawn on a single sheet of vellum using black, red, blue or green and gold ink and mounted on an oak panel. The monumental panel shows the earth as a flat, almost circular land mass traversed by rivers and mountain ranges, interspersed with seas and lakes and encircled by a narrow strip of ocean. The map relies on a basic model of representation going back to antiquity: it is a so-called "T-O map," meaning a circular, O-shaped image of the world divided into three parts by bodies of water arranged in the shape of a T. Depicting the ecumenical community as orbis tripartitus with the three continents known at the time, the east-oriented map shows Asia taking up the entire upper semicircle and Europe and Africa the left and right half of the lower semicircle. The Mediterranean, the Don and the Nile are located in the midst of the three continents. Not a travel map, the Hereford map is to be understood as a universal imago mundi, an image of the world. In the centre of the map, and thus of the world, appears Jerusalem, the city from which the history of salvation started out. Strikingly, Europe includes considerably more topographical details, rivers and cities than Asia or Africa. The farther you move away from city-rich Europe and from Asia Minor and North Africa towards the edges, the wilder and more inhospitable the areas and the stronger the animals and human beings you encounter on your graphic hike. You meet legendary peoples, hybrid creatures and curious animals scattered across the entire earth backdrop. India and Ethiopia have the largest share of them: India is home to the sciapods, the pygmies and the giants, the mouthless people, the manticore and the unicorn. North of lndia, in Scythia and neighbouring countries and islands, we encounter humans with horse's hooves, long-eared people and man-eaters. Ethiopia is home to satyrs and fauns, to long-lipped people and ones with faces between the shoulders and on the chest. Some of the wondrous beings must, in fact, have left their ancestral homelands following the discovery of America, for the European conquerors spotted dog-headed creatures (cynocephali) and headless Blemmyes in Latin America as well.

Creatures of the Mappa Mundi - Monocules, 2018.

The dwellers at the earth's edge shown in the Hereford map refer to numerous fantastic mythical creatures which already preoccupied the ancient authors. Pliny's Natural History and De mirabilibus mundi, a "collection of curiosities" compiled by the late antique polyhistor Solinus who is repeatedly mentioned in the mop, passed down those mythological narrative which forced the church fathers to somehow explain whether the human-like "monsters" could have been part of the divine plan of creation. Saint Augustine was convinced that, provided they were indeed human beings, they had to have descended from Adam and Eve or from Noah's sons as legitimate images of God. The Bible doesn't say anything about how Noah divided the large cake called earth among his sons, but it is assumed that he gave the biggest and best piece to his firstborn son, Shem. The next best one went to Japheth and then all that was left for Ham, who had been cursed by his father, was Africa. In the clerical theory of descent, Ham thus became the progenitor of the Africans, condemned by his father to be his brothers' servant. Thus, the right to oppress and enslave was derived from the miracle of creation.

Shonibare's approach to the hybrid creatures and projections of the Hereford Mappa Mundi is, again, that of playful parody. Conveniently, hybridity is essentially the defining feature of those living at the earth's edge. In the catalogue of origin myths and fictitious genealogies, they represent the radical and uncanny Other and thus reflect a massive Occidental ethnocentrism. Shonibare, however, converts this exclusion into elegant exclusivity by celebrating the peculiarity and eccentricity of those figments of the imagination and turns them into aliens fallen from the sky who, equipped with parachutes, float in the air or have already landed. Other-worldly creatures, they are oddballs in decorative surroundings who are appreciated and respected for their peculiarity. The brightly colourful textile works present a cheerful deconstruction and reversal of dark stereotypes. The 2019 exhibition Creatures of the Mappa Mundi shown at Hereford Cathedral is an impressive document of inclusion and emancipation, as Shonibare and his cooperation partners managed to get various local groups of marginalized people involved in the production of the truly wonderful creatures. In this way, a different story is told.