Mask

When the first masks of the Congolese Teke-Tsaayi peoples arrived in Europe in the early 1900s, their geometric designs appealed greatly to artists and collectors. Yet Europeans only saw and admired the formal properties, whereas for the Teke-Tsaayi themselves the masks were repositories of coded historic knowledge. The lines and shapes appear to form a language, whose signs refer to clan animals, celestial bodies, human body parts, and roads and crossroads. During a masquerade the dancer performed a cartwheel, which, for a very brief moment, would alter the disposition of the signs, and thus the “reading” of the mask.