The Age of Enlightenment--Jean le Rond d'Alembert Linked to the accumulation of knowledge--and with it, power, wealth and territorial expansion--the 18th-century Age of Enlightenment has become a strong focus in Shonibare's most recent sculptural and photographic works. Specifically, he suggests through these works that the Enlightenment thinkers who "liberated" reason in the 18th century conversely founded the arguments for colonial conquest and domination in the 19th century, which took the "civilizing mission" as their justification. The fine line between reason and unreason is expanded in this sculptural vignette. The series of five figures is based on key thinkers of the Enlightenment and includes Fremch mathematician Jean le Rond d'Atembert (1717-1783). Shonibare has altered his five Enlightenment figures, giving each a physical disability that questions our perceptions of what is "normal" or acceptable and what is not. d'Amembert is shown with a prosthetic leg and crutches and Scottish economist Adam Smith (adjacent) is presented with a hunched back. These alterations make rare autobiographical reference to the artist's own physical disability‹he was left partially paralyzed after contracting a virus at the age of 19‹and interrogate our concepts of reason and unreason within the present. Shonibare observes, "In giving Adam Smith and Jean le Rond d'Alembert disabilities . . . I wanted also to use it as a device for showing how these figures, who were partly responsible for defining otherness in the context of the Enlightenment, could be also 'othered' in the context of disability."