Royal Academy, London
What – where is all the mediocre art? Yinka Shonibare has turned this annual event into a thrilling, thoughtful showcase boasting giant fruit and Colston in chains
The statue of Sir Joshua Reynolds, founder of the Royal Academy, stands in its courtyard, usually garlanded with flowers when the Summer Exhibition is on. This year it wears instead a sash of Dutch wax print, the fabric of complex colonial histories that British Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare has made his trademark. As coordinator of this year’s show, Shonibare starts as he means to go on – not so much denouncing the establishment as tricking it, getting it to see things his way and leaving it more radically transformed than if he’d actually toppled Sir Joshua.
Let’s not sentimentalise history. The RA was founded in 1768, bang in the middle of Britain’s most profitable engagement in the transatlantic slave trade, by artists happy to portray slavers. So there’s historical justice in the revolution Shonibare enacts in the grand salons of Burlington House. He exacts retribution with a smile and blows up ingrained inequality with the kindest of explosives. Everyone will leave happy – and changed.
