Jardin d’amour

Solo show at Musée du quai Branly. 2007
Date: 3 April, 2007 until 8 July, 2007

Jardin d’amour was a Yinka Shonibare MBE exhibition installed in the garden-gallery of the Musée du Quai Branley, Paris, 3/4/07 - 8/7/07

“In this work by Yinka Shonibare, visitors are invited to enter a labyrinth reminiscent of the lovers’ pathways in French rococo gardens. The installation comprises three groups of lovers, inspired by the works painted by Jean Honoré Fragonard for Madame du Barry less than 20 years before the French Revolution: Love Letters, The Lover Crowned and The Pursuit (1771-1773). Their aristocratic attire was created with waxed cotton fabrics from the European textile industry, originally intended for export to Indonesia and popularly assimilated in West Africa. Today they embody the continent through their whimsical exuberance. With humour and perceptiveness, the artist showcases the carefree frivolity of a society whose prosperity was founded on colonial exploitation and slavery, and which would soon find itself facing the guillotine.”

Taken from the flyleaf of Jardin d’amour Musée du quai Branly, Paris/Flammarion, Paris 2007.

In 2011, Jardin d’amour was re-presented as part of the exhibition, I Know Something About Love.

From the press release:

“This exhibition at Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art was devoted to works by Yang Fudong, Shirin Neshat, Christodoulos Panayiotou and Yinka Shonibare MBE. Each of these artists explores the theme of love in different times and cultures through the spectrum of their personal experience, observation and commentary. The exhibition title takes its cue from a 1960s song written by Bert Berns and performed by The Exciters, in which there is the recurring lyric, ‘I know something about love’.
 
Yinka Shonibare MBE re-created the installation ‘Jardin d’amour’ (Garden of Love), which he originally showed in 2007 at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, albeit in a different configuration. In this work Shonibare applies a playfully political perspective to his exploration of the theme of love in the eighteenth-century Rococo period in France.
 
This exhibition was curated by Ziba Ardalan and is accompanied by a new publication, co-published and distributed internationally by Koenig Books.”

»  I Know Something About Love

Catalogue relating to an exhibition, 2011

»  Jardin d’Amour catalogue

Catalogue relating to an exhibition, 2007