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Creator:
National Museum of African Art  Search this
Type:
YouTube Videos
Uploaded:
2016-05-03T17:28:47.000Z
Views:
3,264
Video Title:
Yinka Shonibare MBE’s Un Ballo in Maschera (A Masked Ball) (excerpt)
Description:
In Un Ballo in Maschera, Yinka Shonibare MBE interweaves and subverts the geographies and temporal assumptions that shape narratives of tradition and modernity. The artist draws on Giuseppe Verdi’s 1859 opera of the same name about the 18th-century Swedish king Gustav III, who was assassinated at a masked ball while his countrymen fought a war far from home. In Shonibare’s rendition, the event is an allegory for political hubris—with the artist specifically thinking of the Iraq war—and a playful attempt to reveal that the Western world has its traditions, too. Dramatized by masked characters in gowns and frock coats made from the colorfully patterned wax-print fabric produced in the Netherlands and England but typically considered to be “African,” the scenes move from the rhythm of a beating heart to a sumptuous ball. There, the king, portrayed by a woman, is shot dead, only to stand again and repeat the performance in a play on the circling of history and the looping of time-based media.
Video Duration:
35 sec
YouTube Category:
Education  Search this
Topic:
Art, African  Search this
See more by:
SmithsonianAfricanAr
Data Source:
National Museum of African Art
YouTube Channel:
SmithsonianAfricanAr
EDAN-URL:
edanmdm:yt_VCKPs_bPohk