I spent an hour at Central Nigeria Unmasked: Arts of the Benue River Valley this morning and felt like I’d been left alone in an anthropologist’s attic, free to open old trunks and disentangle film reels. Kudos to UCLA’s Fowler Museum and the Musée du quai Branly for organizing an exhibit that immerses you in another time and place.
The show takes visitors on a journey up Nigeria’s Benue River, moving through the artistic traditions of multiple, distinct ethnic groups. Its 150 masks, figurines, vessels and weapons are fascinating as works of art and as ritualistic objects. While the masks take center stage, the “healing vessels” are of particular interest, created as a way to transfer illness from a sick patient to an inanimate object. One vessel, for example, is covered with small bumps, mimicking a pox-like disease. Others are designed to protect women and their unborn fetuses.
What makes the show come alive, however, are several films that show Benue Valley ritual masquerades. I was totally absorbed by the Super 8 films (above) shot by UCLA art historian Arnold Rubin in 1965 and 1970. They haven’t been shown in public before and don’t have a soundtrack, which enhances their other-worldly quality. The dancers represent resurrected ancestral spirits, clothed in raffia capes and hybrid human-animal masks.
According to the Fowler’s press release, Rubin’s fieldwork was the inspiration for this exhibition. One can imagine the professor providing a narrative of Middle Benue masquerades to UCLA colleagues of the era, opening a window into a little-studied region then engulfed in the Biafran War. It must have been a revelation. Still is.
Central Nigeria Unmasked: Arts of the Benue River Valley runs through March 4, 2012 at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art.
Related: Los Angeles Times review
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