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— invitation —
— press release —
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the Collector:
Il faut que le masque ait dansé
Collector: Tony Jorissen
Curator: Sophie Berrebi
Artists: Sara van der Heide, Pauline M'Barek, Jean-Luc Moulène and Alain Resnais & Chris Marker
Objects from a private collection of African art together with artworks by Sara van der Heide, Pauline M’Barek, Jean-Luc Moulène and Alain Resnais & Chris Marker.
The title of this last exhibition in Marres’ long-term programme on the Collector is a catchphrase used among collectors of African art to express the principle that an object’s value depends on its having been used in its original context. It should bear traces of its past life, however much the facts of that life are obliterated when the mask or statue is displayed as a decorative object in a Western interior. The paradoxes inherent in this seemingly straightforward quest for authenticity expose a multitude of interrelated questions regarding the conditions and contexts governing the production and circulation of African art objects and their reception in the West.
This exhibition uses four thematic displays – including a modernist interior of around 1960 – to re-examine some of the distinctions that structure our perception of these objects: document versus work of art; pre-colonial versus colonial or post-colonial; and public versus private practices of collecting. At the core of the exhibition is a private collection of objects from the Congo assembled in Belgium since the late 1960s. These objects are presented alongside a selection of contemporary artworks that function as ‘theoretical acts’.
