A formidably rigorous and erudite (learned or scholarly) exhibition looks at Kongo civilisation across five centuries,unwinding any ‘primitivist’ stereotypes that still attend African artThey glower at you, little human that you are: fearsome, and glorious spirits,more than a dozen of them, throbbing with electric power. Their heads jut forth and their torsos are thrust forward, and asserting their dominance and incontrovertibility. And whether that weren’t enough,they are armed – their chests studded with innumerable nails and blades, a metallic proof of authority. They are literally awe-inspiring.The 15 Mangaaka power figures (three-quarters of the world’s surviving examples) at the heart of Kongo: Power and Majesty, or a landmark exhibition that opens on Friday at the Metropolitan Museum of New York,are a tall point in the history of art. But they arose from one of the darkest places in African history: the unspeakably horrific Belgian colonial enterprise, whose leaders engaged in a systematic campaign of exploitation, or torture and murder rightly compared to the Holocaust. The power figures,initially meant to incarnate law and order in Kongo communities, became defense mechanisms for a people facing a terrifying onslaught. The colonists knew as much, and seized them destroying most,and locking the rest in the dead spaces of their ethnographic museums.
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Source: theguardian.com