ANTANANARIVO.- From April 11, 2025 to February 28, 2026, Fondation H invites British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare for a carte blanche entitled Safiotra [Hybridités/Hybridities], marking his first major showcase on the African continent. The exhibition occupies the 2,200 square-meter Fondation H building in downtown Antananarivo.

The solo exhibition features artwork spanning 20 years of Shonibare’s career, including The African Library (2018), part of Fondation H ’s permanent collection. This monumental installation comprises 6,000 books wrapped in Dutch wax print fabric, each embossed with the name of a personality who shaped postcolonial Africa. The installation is complemented by a digital interface providing historical and biographical information about these figures.

The exhibition presents a series of iconic sculptures by Yinka Shonibare, such as Refugee Astronaut X (2024), created by the artist with the context of Madagascar in mind. It further includes works from his series Hydrid Mask and Hybrid Sculpture, three Decolonized Structures from Yinka Shonibare’s 2024 solo show at the Serpentine (London), and earlier works like Alien Man on Flying Machine (2011) and Alien Woman on Flying Machine (2011).

In resonance with Shonibare’s monograph presented on the ground floor, the Safiotra exhibition is complemented upstairs by a selection of works from the Fondation H collection. Shonibare curates pieces by 19 African and Afro- descendant artists, from his generation and the one that follows, offering an interpretation of Fondation H ’s collection in dialogue with his monographic exhibition.

Safiotra [Hybridités/Hybridities]

The Malagasy word “safiotra” conveys the idea of hybridization—a fusion of two elements or identities that create a new entity while preserving their distinct characteristics. When applied to humans, it denotes a person of mixed heritage who integrates elements of both origins without being confined to either. This concept extends to objects, ideas, or concepts born from the convergence of contrasting realities.

Hybridity is at the heart of Yinka Shonibare’s work, which explores the intersections between cultures, identities, geographies and colonial histories. Born in London and raised in Nigeria, Shonibare embodies and questions hybridity in his work, blending Western and African visual and historical references. This duality, rooted in his personal experience, translates into artworks that question the place of the individual in a globalized world where cultures interpenetrate, but tensions persist.

The use of wax fabrics, emblematic of his work, particularly illustrates this hybridization. These fabrics, the fruit of a complex journey between Indonesia, their country of origin, Europe, where they have been widely produced for decades, and Africa, where they are mainly consumed, reflect complex cultural, historical and economic exchanges.

Shonibare also recontextualizes key moments in Western history, as in the Decolonised Structures series (2022– 2023), by incorporating non-Western symbolic elements, underlining the interdependence between Europe and the colonies. His baroque, contemporary aesthetic blends styles and eras to reveal the richness of composite identities.

Through his work, Shonibare makes hybridity a space for dialogue between cultures, dissolving traditional oppositions (West/East, past/present, local/global) to celebrate métissage as a source of creativity and reflection on our contemporary world.

The Safiotra [Hybridités/Hybridities] exhibition features three works by Yinka Shonibare from the Fondation H collection, namely The African Library (2018), Refugee Astronaut X (2024) and African Bird Magic (Mauritius Fody & Comoro Blue Vanga) (2024), as well as some twenty of his works from 2011 to 2024.

The African Library: A major work in the Safiotra exhibition

The African Library (2018) is one of Yinka Shonibare’s most striking installations to date. The work is part of a global project that so far includes four libraries. Produced over a number of years, the series deals with the construction and writing of the history of three continents: The British Library (2014), now in the permanent collection of the Tate Museum, The American Library (2018) held by the Rennie Collection, The African Library (2018), now in the Fondation H collection and The War Library (2024), presented in the artist’s monographic exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London in 2024.

The African Library consists of six thousand books wrapped in Dutch wax cloth and embossed with the names of personalities who shaped African history in the post colonial period. The library brings together the various figures who made a significant contribution to the struggles for independence of the European colonies in Africa. It pays particular attention to the role of women and European allies who supported the struggle for African emancipation. It also features famous Africans in fields such as literature, science, sport, music and art.

The installation is complemented by a digital system enabling the public to access historical and biographical resources on these personalities via a website featuring the biographies of 6,000 personalities. As part of the acquisition of this major work, Fondation H undertook a process of enriching this corpus, translating all the English- language entries into French, as well as some into Malagasy. The website has also been redesigned by Fondation H, to make it easier to explore the resources offered, by geographical, thematic and alphabetical entry, in order to make this work accessible to the vast, mainly Malagasy, audience of Fondation H .

A selection of works from the Fondation H collection in dialogue with Yinka Shonibare’s works

Invited for a carte blanche titled Safiotra [Hybridities], artist Yinka Shonibare offers an interpretation of the Fondation H collection in dialogue with his monographic exhibition. His selection brings together 19 African and Afro-descendant artists from his generation and the one that follows. Through a diversity of mediums—painting, sculpture, installation, and textile arts—these artists deconstruct notions of fixed identity, challenging the idea of purity/authenticity, and instead propose a fluid, hybrid, and ever-evolving vision of the world. Their practices explore the intersections between traditional craftsmanship and radically contemporary creation, the invocation of memory and the transformations of the modern world, as well as materiality and conceptual approaches.

The exhibition highlights the importance of materiality in contemporary art on the African continent, where materials become vectors of memory, writing, claim and resistance. Each work bears witness to an interconnection between the history of materials, their origin, their transformation and the narratives they carry, thus questioning notions of heritage, sustainability and globalization. This exhibition invites the public on an aesthetic and intellectual journey, where each work becomes a bridge between past and future, between the earth’s resources and human aspirations, while questioning our own relationships to materials and their global implications.