africanah.org

Masks are key agents in most initiations: they protect, teach, inflict punishment, frighten, give up their secrets and participate actively in the quest for identity.

Romuald Hazoumè’s masks generate surprise and questioning, fitting well the creative effervescence of great transformations. The work of this celebrated Beninese artist springs from an initiatory process that has led him to question his role and to explore new avenues of thought about the consumer society, the West’s appalling wastefulness and the issues surrounding recycling in Africa. Hazoumè comes from a background in which Christianity rubs shoulders with and is permeated by Beninese Vodun rituals. He observes with humour, but without complacency, the clash of cultures whose limits he tests through his work. His masks inevitably bring to mind those used in African initiations, but they also evoke the types the West is suspiciously enamoured with. They are literally as well as figuratively pseudo masks (bidon, in French, means both jerry can and phoney). They hold a mirror up to our contradictions, our questions about authenticity, and our love of art and its manifestations.

The exhibition includes works from the private and public collections of Musée Dapper, Rotterdam’s Wereldmuseum and Antwerp’s Museum aan de Stroom. Above all, and quite exceptionally, there are also major pieces from the Royal Museum of Central Africa in Tervuren (Belgium), which will be temporarily closed for renovation, enabling Musée Dapper to showcase an important series of objects for its own public.