The Invisible Man (2015) sculpture and photo series

 

The Invisible Man by Zina Saro-Wiwa copyThe Invisible Man is a neo-Ogoni mask created by Zina Saro-Wiwa. Inspired by the newer “Ogele style” masquerade masks that have started appearing in Ogoniland in the late 1980s, the mask is one that depicts the men that have disappeared in Zina’s life through death or through their own design. Brother, father, lovers and illusive Ogele dancers feature on the Janus-faced mask. The black and white face representing the sadness of loss, the lined pink face the anger associated with abandonment. Worn by women only.



The Invisible Man: “The Weight of Absence” (2015) Video Triptych
The Invisible Man: “The Weight of Absence” (2015) 6 mins, video triptych, is the first video featuring and inspired by Zina’s Invisible Man mask commissioned by Seattle Art Museum for their Disguise exhibition. The triptych is a response to the detachment inherent in the display of African masks in museums. It is in direct conversation with Disguise’s remit of “bridging the gap between the mask observed in isolation and the masquerade experienced as a catalyst”. The gap, as Saro-Wiwa sees it, is brought about by emotional and cognitive disconnection to African masks and the performance of masquerade. This work and the very creation of Zina’s Invisible Man mask attempts to bring emotional discourse and emotional connectivity to a masquerade practise whose psycho-emotional geographies are diffuse:

“I wanted to create a masquerade “performance” that subverted even Seattle Art Museum’s expectations of what such a performance should look like. I didn’t just want to gather my all-female troupe have them dance with the mask I designed, film the process and say “here you go”.  That might have been radical enough – having an all-female troupe, is subversive in itself – but I wanted to go further and challenge the museum’s ideas of what it means to “perform a masquerade”. I also wanted to challenge masquerade in Nigeria by going within and opening up emotional terrains. Many masks in Ogoni play on fears, talk about farming, make political statements. But I wanted to go to a more emotionally-specific place. The Invisible Man is about me creating a mask I could connect to. So I picked a highly emotional subject that had a particular resonance for me.  This work is about my attempt to map the emotional geography of masquerade, to get it to tell a more intimate story and to see if creating this mask and performance had any carthatic properties. There is a magic in masquerade that I do not understand. But I am attempting to tap into it through this work.”

Weiblichkeit als Maskerade

Wie Joan Riviere in ihrer legendären Studie Weiblichkeit als Maskerade betont, hat die Maskerade zuallererst die Funktion ein wirkungsvolles Instrument des Schutzes zu sein: Die in der Maskerade vorgestellte -' vorgeschützte' - Identität vermag das Subjekt vor Angriffen zu bewahren, due es von aussen zu befürchten meint. Damit beschreibt Riviere die Maskerade sehr ähnlich, wie der Psychoanalytiker Diedier Anzieu die Funktion der Haut definiert: Haut (die Anzieu als eine gleichzeitige "organische und imaginär originäre Gegebenheit" begreift) ist nach seiner epistemologischen Definition "erstes Instrument zwischen Innen und Aussen. Zum anderen aber ist sie "Schutzvorrichtung unserer Individualität", insofern sie als Grenzfläche dient, die das Subjekt als solches abschliesst.
aus Marianne Loos, Kleidung als zweite Haut in: Philipp Zitzelsperger, Kleidung im Bild; Enstetten/Berlin. S 137
zitiert:
Joan Riviere, Weiblichkeit als Maskerade, 1926

Phyllis Galembo, Camouflage

Phyllis Galembo: Masquerade

West African Masquerade features 13 large-format color photographs, taken on location between 2004 and 2006 in the West African countries of Nigeria, Burkina Faso, and Benin. Galembo has crossed cultural boundaries and earned national recognition for her work. Art in America has praised her combination of a "careful, almost ethnographic observation with a deep sense of mystical wonder," and the New York Times recognized the "dignity, conviction, and formal power" in her photographs.

Galembo's work has been driven by curiosities and questions such as, "What happens when we put on a mask and inhabit a different persona?" and "How does ritual dress contribute to our connection to spirituality?" Galembo considers herself an artist, not an anthropologist, and her decisions about color, light, and background have more to do with aesthetic desires than ethnographic precision. She is focused on the invention and expressive craft of costume-making and the potential for transformation that wearing such garments allows.

The elaborate costumes featured are often made of inexpensive materials such as raffia, carved wood, coarse fabrics, crocheted yarns, body paint, flowers, grasses, leaves, and sticks. The outfits run a gamut of dramatic designs and shapes, from striped-knit bodysuits to appliquéd fabric costumes as voluminous as pup tents. One from Burkina Faso, looks like a walking sunflower, its wearer hidden under a cascade of fresh green leaves. A ghostly white-clad figure from Nigeria is topped with a grimacing painted-wood skull worn like a hat.

Created for festivities and ceremonies such as weddings and burials, initiations, chiefs' coronations, and holidays like Christmas and the New Year, the costumes can be worn to disguise anyone, from a grown man or woman to a child. The subjects range from adults to teenagers, but Galembo does not know the identity of the individual beneath each mask. This mystery lies at the heart of her interest in costuming and masking — acts that allow the wearer to become something else, to change gender, or species, or even into spirits.