'Radical Hybridity' marks the Chinese premiere of Yinka Shonibare CBE RA's films, 'Odile and Odette' (2005-2006) and 'Addio del Passato' (2011) at M WOODS. The films are screened in the museum's reconstructed Ming dynasty temples that were originally built in 1452 - a period marked by widespread migration and cross-pollination in China, echoing the artist's own interest in cultural hybridity.
'Odile and Odette '(2005-2006) is a film made in collaboration with the Royal Opera House. Here, Shonibare re-imagines a classical episode from Tchaikovsky’s Ballet Swan Lake, where the lead roles 'Odile' and 'Odette' engage in a close dialogue of gestures and movement. Odile and Odette are characters which embody “good” and “evil” and are traditionally danced by a sole prima ballerina. The artist transforms this classical part into a complex and subtle interplay between two dancers in which the duality of the characters is played out in racial difference. Mirroring each other’s expression on either side of an ornate Baroque frame, Shonibare suggests that their movement is both estranged and united. The dancers perform a passage from the ballet in a studio stage set to silence, the rhythm of their pointe shoes creates the only soundtrack to the film.
Filmed from one side of a “stage set” but using two cameras, the doubling effect is further played out as the dancers switch side of the mirror frame and creates a visual environment where the viewer is privileged to see the work performed from both sides of the 'mirror'. The film's narrative and construction suggest that both characters are one and that their complex relationship is both co-dependent and formed by each other.
In a recent interview Shonibare said: “What I find interesting is the idea that you cannot define Africa without Europe. The idea that there is some kind of dichotomy between Africa and Europe - between the ‘exotic other’ and the ‘civilized European’, if you like - I think is completely simplistic. I am interested in exploring the mythology of these two so-called separate spheres, and in creating an overlap of identities.”
'Addio del Passato' (2011) is the title of an aria about betrayal, love and loss from Verdi’s opera La Traviata, sung by the dying heroine Violetta. In this film Shonibare CBE alters the characters so the aria is performed by a black singer in the guise of Frances Nisbet, the wife who Nelson betrayed and abandoned during a lengthy affair with Lady Hamilton. Here Nisbet agonizes over her own life and Nelson’s absence, even envisaging his death in a series of tableaux (the Fake Death Pictures) that occur outside the immediate action of the film, as though giving form to her tortured thoughts and daydreams.
'Addio del Passato' is Shonibare’s first investigation of Nelson’s wider human story; more typically he views Nelson in a purely metaphorical sense, as a cipher for empire. As an artist he works with aesthetics, metaphor, politics; indeed, his headless and faceless figures are purposefully not “individuals” with whom we could identify as people. As such, despite its obvious artifice, the level of emotional intensity and engagement offered by 'Addio del Passato' is unexpected, breathtaking. Like 'Un Ballo in Maschera' (2004), this work features what at first seems to be the looping of the film. However, this is not a loop, but an actual live replaying, the singer beginning her song and her walk through the house and landscape again. In this case the repeated action implies an endless cycle of sadness and despair that amplifies the potency of feeling and sense of hopelessness. The film explores the concept of destiny as it relates to themes of desire, yearning, love, power and sexual repression.
The film was shot in the magnificent surroundings of Syon Park, just outside London, which is the ancestral home of the Duke of Northumberland. Originally built in the sixteenth century, it was extensively remodeled in the eighteenth century by two of the most renowned designers of the period to reflect contemporary fashions - Robert Adam working on the house and Capability Brown on the landscape. This location extends Shonibare’s reference to the aristocracy and the trappings of wealth.
