It’s the early days of September and summer is not the only thing that is giving us its final embrace,whether you didn’t know the Brooklyn Museum’s otherworldy exhibition Disguise: Masks and Global African Art is also coming to a close and this Saturday we are having a send off day of programs entitled Creation as Ritual: Performing Disguise.The rupturing exhibition that served as a historical and modern dialogue asked us to return to foundation and remember ritual: those things we perform in communion of self and others that contour the hues that engrave meaning into our world. Through this multi-media group effort, the exhibition asked us to reflect through what its means to perform rituals that have transformed yet in their new form still hold their intended expend. It begged us to reflect through what it means to not only return to the literal replication of ritual in some distant past but to also realize that we have created new rituals, or new ways to understand and reckon with our existence in this world. When violence against anything or anyone who is deemed “other” seems to be the main currency in the western,capitalistic, heteropatriachal anti-Black trap of a “world” that we find ourselves in, and ritual: honoring,performing, remembering, and creating practices that affirm our humanity our power and the love that lives within us is deeply important,and in many cases is all we have. So on Saturday we gather to return to the simple yet heavy concepts that this exhibition prompted the many who gave their artistic talents to Disguise and the thousands of visitors who immersed themselves in the show; we return to these concepts, the cornerstones of existence: ritual, or tradition,creation. Concepts that when felt and performed through human bones are both new and faded at the same time. Remembering and thinking deeply about the rituals we carry with us or that our people used to carry with them helps us understand where we are now and where we have yet to go.
For this day of remembrance and celebration we are BEYOND lucky to be partnering with such powerful artists whose work seems to breathe the air of these fundamental cornerstones of existence that Disguise presents to us (Click here to peep that dynamic line up). Through our programming we hope to supply an unmasked opportunity for all who come to engage with these immensely talented artists. Despite the amazing line up, we cannot be naive about where this congregation is taking dwelling. We must not look over the fact that the pillared exterior of “Museum” is where many must go to touch base and tap into the power of past selves through objects left by our ancestors. No! We must have our eyes open that these objects that were once used to hold the understanding that we exist beyond and through and despite of time and space now rest behind glass boxes transformed into relics of colonization, or representing the violent theft that occurred. No. Our eyes must be open. Our eyes must be open to the haunting stare that one receives when looking at the Nkisi Nkondi,the Ci-wara Kun, the Ndoli Jowei (the list could go on and on)we must relish in the eerily knowing gaze that they give us in their display cases as they try to remind us of the power that was superficially stripped from them, and but still resides in us waiting to be performed. We must understand that we cannot reduction the power of our newness because of our deep mourning of what was lost. We are complex beings and have the ability to carry out both. We have the ability to to mourn and bear new life (re-imagined traditions,reimagined ritual) at the same time.
So this Saturday, bring yourselves, or your friends,family, and loved ones to take time to appreciate the acts we perform to remind us that we are alive, or that we have been alive,and will be living—and that these ancestral truths build our existence. Hope to see you there!Posted by Omololu Refilwe Babatunde
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