All Dressed Up: Renarrativizing Contemporary African Masks
Program of African Studies, Northwestern University
Conference on "Dress, Popular Culture, and Social Action in Africa"
March 2009
Otto Contemporary Gallery of Fine Arts
March-April 2007
Memory is a reconstruction in the present.
By renarrativizing my 2007 exhibition, "Contemporary African Masks", I construct history not as it happened, but as I position it within my current historical problematic. That is, Memory continues to mask History.
The thirty-two original images are displayed alongside my latest enquiries on masking. The children are reprinted on the same banner material, then pasted onto commericial "African" fabrics - which are, in fact, printed everywhere but Africa. I revandalize "Jah"; I mangle "Jump"; and I just plain mask the "Architect of Peace", a man who now attempts to facilitate dialogue between competing political parties before African elections.
Map pins (see "In Defense of Tradition") are an indication of home and identity, crossing the Africa/West boudary by placing the mask of an African gangster MacBeth-esque behind a curtain. He is waiting to murder - accidentally, of course - the mother of his image.
The Masai are perhaps the most exploited of the African images, and their colonizers left a legacy of Victorian Masks which you can purchase for R25 at a variety store in Johannesburg.
"Without fear or favour, affection or ill-will" is the penultimate line of the Judicial Oath in Botswana. Since 1966, it has been acceptable to omit the last line: "SO HELP ME GOD."
Domestic violence is rampant in Botswana, and "Shrine" is my attempt to discuss it through my images: men rule the public sphere (de jure and de facto), while the women are in charge of the house. How the men negotiate this public/private power schism comes out in how they dressed up on that elucidating day in 2006.
Like the clothes worn by those who have them, the show is hung almost entirely on lines, as though it were baking in the African sun.
In Defense of Tradition, 2009 || 38" x 18"
In Defense of Tradition, 2009 || detail
Architect of Peace, 2009 || 34" x 62"
Architect of Peace, 2009 || detail
Architect of Peace, 2009 || detail
Victorian Masai, 2009 || 59" x 77"
Jump, 2009 || 34" x 62"
"Without Fear or Favour, Affection or Ill-will", 2009 || 42.5" x 69"
"Without Fear or Favour, Affection or Ill-will", 2009 || detail
"Without Fear or Favour, Affection or Ill-will", 2009 || detail
Jah, 2009 || 33" x 21.5"
Photochop, 2009 || 36" x 13"
Photochop, 2009 || detail
Zorro, 2009 || 60" x 50"
Zorro, 2009 || detail
Shrine to Domestic Violence, 2009 || installation - 8' high x 8' wide x 5' deep
Shrine to Domestic Violence, 2009 || detail
Shrine to Domestic Violence, 2009 || detail
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CURATION
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