BACK TO ARTIST
ARTIST STATEMENT
Visages de Masques / Faces of Masks questions the layered histories of the most internationally celebrated and commercialized form of African art—the mask. For more than a century, African masks have migrated into foreign museums, where particular regional styles usually receive ethnic labels—a colonial-era stereotype critiqued as the “one style, one tribe” method. To be received as authentic in the museum, masks are expected to have been ceremonially used in the context of origin, the earlier the better.
Hervé Youmbi noticed while attending masquerades in Bamileke communities that some performers wore imported, Chinese-made plastic Halloween masks representing Ghostface, the character in Wes Craven’s series of Scream horror films that he derived from Edvard Munch’s painting. This led Hervé Youmbi to develop hybrid masks that combined different African styles and various outside influences yet nonetheless could be indigenously performed after satisfying the strict ritual rules of masquerade groups—such as the Ku’ngang Society, which requires its masks to have horns and long dreadlocks of human hair.
Youmbi’s hybrid masks have multiple faces in the sense that they are designed to function in different contexts and for different audiences, either showing first in an art context and then moving to a ritual context, or vice versa, or migrating more than once. Masks that have been ritually “authenticated” and travel to art venues and museums, have their dual status underscored by “two-faced” labels: one label describes the mask using the formula for contemporary art works (listing first the artist’s name followed by a note that describes the conceptual framework of the installation), while the other label describes the mask as an ethnographic object, listing first the originating ethnic context (such as “Bamileke”) followed by the modern country into which this culture was colonized (Cameroon), the mask’s indigenous name (e.g. “Ku’ngang mask), and other data. Youmbi also mimics the position of the anthropologist as “participant observer” to authenticate through photographs and videos each mask being performed in situ. This visual documentation he exhibits alongside each mask, together with the crate the mask travels in and all its attendant documentation, testifying to its export, import, insurance, fumigation, and more.
The process of the mask moving between worlds does not necessarily end there, though. Any mask can also, museum permitting, travel back to Cameroon to participate there in rituals and ceremonies, and then return to the museum. Also, where a mask remains in a museum and cannot return, Youmbi creates a duplicate mask that remains in Cameroon and continues its ritual life. Each mask can thus perform “double duty”—as a sacred ritual object in a specific African society and as an object of aesthetic and conceptual contemplation in a distant gallery or museum. In this way, Youmbi opens up the possibility for each mask to create positive relationships of exchange and sharing between distant communities, similar to what occurs when museums and African communities negotiate issues of repatriation.
Hervé Youmbi remarks: “The impact of colonization’s dual reality—opposing the so-called ‘traditional’ with the ‘modern or contemporary’— is evident in all sectors of postcolonial African life: religion, politics, art, culture…and perhaps it lies at the root of the dullness and inertia in which Africa can seem stuck. But can we say that colonization extinguished the production of true objects of African art? What type of authenticity are we talking about? Who should define authenticity, and why? And incidentally, what ‘Africa’ are we talking about?”
In more recent applications, Hervé Youmbi has extended his Visages de Masques project beyond the context of Ku’ngang, engaging other masquerade societies among the Bamileke, and more recently beyond Cameroon.