Beguiling: Yinka Shonibare, at the Serpentine Galleries, reviewed

More than seven centuries ago, the medieval cartographer Richard of Haldingham created Hereford Cathedral’s Mappa Mundi; I say ‘created’ because when he drew his map it was largely a work of the imagination. Its terra incognita is populated with bizarre creatures born of the fever dreams of early travel writers: his Africa is inhabited by Monocules, one-eyed, one-legged men who use their single foot as a parasol, and his Asia is roamed by the Bonnacon, a bull-like creature with inward-curling horns whose only defence is his projectile faeces.

Five years ago, when Yinka Shonibare was invited by Hereford Cathedral to design a series of quilts featuring ‘Creatures of the Mappa Mundi’, he told me that as a native Londoner who grew up in Lagos he felt a certain kinship with the hybrid nature of these creatures of the medieval imagination. And there is something beguiling about the defecating Bonnacon appliquéd like a heraldic beast to the colourful quilt in his exhibition at the Serpentine. Like everything else, the quilt features scraps of the ‘African’ batik cloth that has become the artist’s signature.

Since his discovery as a student at Goldsmiths that the wax-printed cloth synonymous with Africa was never, in fact, African at all (it was manufactured in Holland to Indonesian designs for export to British colonies – it’s now made in China) he has used it as a metaphor for the hybridity of our globalised world. It can be glimpsed in the background of his 2023 ‘African Bird Magic’ quilts featuring endangered species and in the illuminated interiors of the miniature models of places of refuge in his new ‘Sanctuary City’ (2024) installation. His ‘Wind Sculpture in Bronze’ (2024), blown in from the park like an autumn leaf, is covered in its brightly coloured patterns, as are – more controversially – his ‘Decolonised Structures’ (2022), fibreglass copies of colonial era monuments to figures from Queen Victoria to Churchill.