Audio Transcript: Art historian Susan Ferleger Brades on Yinka Shonibare

“Contemporary art can seemingly be rather baffling, it seems to come out of nowhere. But most art comes from other art and it becomes truly great and inspiring when you get a fresh take on the past and the present. For me, this happens in an incredibly exciting way in front of Yinka Shonibare's The Swing (after Fragonard).

What’s amazing is that he’s taken my favourite painting and suddenly made it come alive. Fragonard’s painting is actually a rococo piece of frivolity – it’s romantic, it’s suggestive, it’s rather wonderful in its way. But what’s special about Yinka’s work is the way in which he’s taken that and somehow made it more profound.

The woman’s petticoats still billow, her slipper still flies through the air with abandon, the landscape is still lush but suddenly I’m the one who’s being teased and provoked. And because we’re sharing a space together, because we’re more or less of the same size, because she’s 3-dimensional, we understand her differently. She’s headless, she’s dressed in apparently incongruous but absolutely fantastic African fabrics, and suddenly were reminded of, even transported to another place. There’s a reminder lurking that the rococo was also a period of colonialism and of the slave trade.

A lot of contemporary art is stripped down. A lot of it is heavily political. What I love about Yinka’s work and what The Swing epitomises for me is that it’s possible to mix the minimal and the decorative, to bring in popular culture, and to still say something about class, gender, race and you can do so without losing the pleasure principle."