Magazines - Tribal Art Autumn 2009

By Bérénice Geoffroy-Schneiter

Introduction
The exhibition organized by art historian and anthropologist Anne-Marie Bouttiaux at the Musée Royal de l’Afrique Centrale in Tervuren, Belgium, is both stimulating and disturbing. Titled Persona, the installation consists of some 180 traditional masks, most from the museum’s own collection but augmented with examples from other museums and private collections, as well as works by contemporary African artists. Within this context, the curator explores, and not uncritically, the many prisms through which these objects have been collected, seen, judged, and analyzed. Above and beyond the ritual intentions that informed their creation, these objects, transplanted to Western collections in many cases over a century ago, can teach us as much about ourselves as they can about those who sculpted and originally used them.
The first thing to catch the visitor’s eye is a photograph that immediately evokes a sense of unease: a man by the name of G. de Witte is depicted, his colonial helmet firmly planted on his head, striking a pose amid a group of Tshokwe masks as if they were just so many trophies. In fact, this man had arrived in central Africa at the beginning of the 1930s with the intent of finding very different kinds of specimens. Working as a herpetologist and a zoologist, de Witte was better versed in the subtleties of reptilian life in the area—now the southwestern portion of the Democratic Republic of Congo—than in its masks. Made of vegetable fiber and resin, on which paper, textile, and sometimes feather elements were attached, these “icons” of African art were originally the central focus of the ceremonies of the male mukanda society. Now prized by collectors for their sculptural power and the vividness of their colors, they appear in the photo ghostly and disembodied, removed from their context and deprived of their identity.