Catalogue of African art presented on the occasion of Parcours des Mondes.
Year: 2012
Texts: V. Carini
Format: 24 × 29 cm
Pages: 80, 16 colour images
Language: English
African art and the language of masks
African masks represent one of the most powerful and enigmatic expressions of African art.
“Every work of art is basically just a fragment.”
Masks are not objects, but presences that interrupt reality and introduce another dimension, where the invisible emerges within the visible.
Masks as a form of the unconscious
In African art, masks embody the unknown. They are forms shaped by time, chance and collective imagination, giving form to what cannot be fully represented.
They never assume a fixed identity, constantly transformed by movement, dance, rhythm and sound.
Power, invisibility and ritual
Masks function as instruments of power, social, spiritual and ritual.
They make the invisible visible and allow supernatural forces to manifest within structured forms.
Mask and ancestral order
Masks embody the authority of those who understand and control their meaning, preserving the symbolic order of the community.
The time of magic
Masks are power.
The power to create a different temporality, a time of magic where reality and symbol merge.
This catalogue invites the viewer into this suspended dimension, where African art transforms perception itself.
