Museu of Anthropology of Angola exhibits “The Hidden Mask II”

By Pedro Mbinza

The Anthropology Museum of Angola recently inaugurated the second edition of the exhibition “The Hidden Mask,” with ten photographs from the original series of the Belgian musician and photographer Kristof Degrauwe.

The exhibition, supported by the Nesr Art Foundation – Independent Art Foundation and the artists and anthropologists Jamil Osmar, Gato Preto, and Jack Tchindje, is part of the celebrations of International Museum Day.

‘The Hidden Mask’ makes available to the public a new intervention in the museum wings to make the spaces more attractive and enhance the value of the works and masks in a permanent exhibition, providing new designs and colors, as well as a more dynamic and easy to understand experience about the traditional culture of mask making and traditional rituals.

On the sidelines of the event, Kristof Degrauwe told Forbes Lusophone Africa that this is a work that began to be done between 2020 and 2021, with the renovation of an area of the museum that was closed, but recalled that the photographs are part of a series of 29 taken between 1999 and 2000, in Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of Congo.

“In the new spaces, we present a mixture of original masks from the museum, a new statue from the Democratic Republic of Congo, educational murals that talk about circumcision rites,” detailed the also staff member of the Belgian Embassy in Angola, who is about to end his assignment as the person in charge of the ambassador’s residence.

The artist believes that this project can be a driver for future interventions and modernization in museums in Angola, with a very important message of preserving history, culture, and traditions that younger generations should preserve.

Guilherme Mampuya, an Angolan artist who donated an iconic painting to the gala of the 1st edition of the Forbes Social Responsibility Awards 2023, considered it a brilliant initiative by the photographer Kristof Degrauwe and highlighted that the strongest point is the donation of the digital photographs to the museum.

However, he added, collectors need to be given more conditions to share their work with the rest of the population elsewhere; this kind of project requires financial and logistical support.

“The issue of space is no longer a constraint, but rather the projects that have to move,” he said.

The head of the education and cultural animation department of the Anthropology Museum of Angola stressed that the exhibition results from the first edition held in 2021, the time of the Covid-19 pandemic, which raised “much interest” from the national and international public.

“This exhibition is a junction of contemporary and ancestral art.”

“It is photographs and a wooden sculpture that he offered to the museum. Here, we will find several masks from the Cokwe, Bakongo, and Nganguela peoples, such as “Mukixi wa Kambulu”, “Mwana-Pwo”, “Tchanda”, and “Cikunza”, which portray the ritual of female and male initiation, a ceremony of entwining traditional and funeral power”, he reinforced.

For the Belgian ambassador in Angola, Jozef Smets, there is a new way to make the museum live, to revolutionize it with new techniques, and the exhibition digitalizes the information about each photo and object presented.

“The project introduced a key element to modernize access to information through QR codes that are available to visitors,” assured the ambassador of Belgium in Angola.

With information from Forbes

News Angola, English news Angola, Anthropology Museum of Angola