‘All I want is everything’ seems like an apt summary of Italian curator Lorella Scacco’s ambitious exhibition MASKS. Multiple Identities from Antiquity to Contemporary Art at Serlachius Manor in Mänttä, Finland. The somewhat wacky show starts off with a 2000-year-old Roman marble mask and includes everything from kitsch to canon.
This enthusiastically conceived presentation makes no attempt to hide its eclecticism. The exhibition design is confusing to say the least: the museum hall is cluttered with several stand-alone constructions, and there seems to be no logical route through the distinctly disjointed whole. I bounced back and forth between haphazardly placed display cabinets and wall ends. Feeling like an unruly ping-pong ball was half disturbing, half amusing. It was hard to focus on any specific piece as there were always a lot of other things in the corner of my eye. But the crazy composition is also refreshing, pure nonsense architecture painted in eccentric colours: sterile white wall surfaces join areas of joyless dark grey, solemn burgundy, and theatrical deep red. The windowless space couldn’t be murkier. In short, the curator has gone all-in.
The irregular rhythm of the exhibition architecture reflects the sprawling selection of art. Scacco has pulled out all the stops in a way that is worthy of the impossibly broad theme. She has largely confined herself to a concrete, physical definition of the word ‘mask’, but has thought creatively and widely about the object. She also seems to have made full use of her Italian contacts; works and artefacts are on loan from a variety of Italian museums, foundations, and galleries. The most memorable pieces are from the Museo Delle Culture Milano, which has contributed twenty historical masks from a wide range of African cultures, as well as from Bali, Indonesia, and Papua New Guinea. All are of extremely high quality, and in this compact show there are almost too many of them to fully appreciate the craftsmanship and aesthetics. Fortunately, this is a luxury problem.
The masks from non-Western cultures represent the ceremonial and ritualistic, which may be problematic, but all of them pack such an outstanding visual punch that they counteract any potential tokenism or uncomfortable sense of exoticisation. In fact, the exhibition wouldn’t be complete without the West and Central African elements. The brief descriptions of each object’s original purpose also make them stand for more than mere “primitivism.”
That’s more than can be said for Man Ray’s iconic Noire et blanche (1926/1980), which in the context of the exhibition feels laughably empty. The photograph of the white powdered woman dreamily posing with an African mask is simply passé, a vestige of a chauvinist past. This is not to say that the work is not a valuable element of the whole. It helps explain how different cultures and artists influence each other. So does the inclusion of a small work by Pablo Picasso, whose Cubist expression was strongly influenced by African masks. Tête de femme (La Mediterranée) (Head of a Woman [The Mediterranean],1957) is no direct equivalent to Les demoiselles d’Avignon (The ladies of Avignon, 1907), but it is nonetheless a component that calmly and unobtrusively elucidates that cultural appropriation is an ambiguous phenomenon.
Man Ray, Picasso, and Paul Gauguin (represented by the unspectacular woodcut te Atua, a Tahitian word meaning ‘gods’ or ‘spirits’, 1893–94) are displayed near French-Senegalese artist Delphine Diallo’s sepia-toned photography series Mask(2022). Diallo’s self-portraits with African masks are quietly resistant, but I feel an urge for something more. Like, for example, Zanele Muholi’s merciless gaze or Phyllis Galembo’s colourful documentation of various African masquerades. A little more oomph and energy, to put it simply. Moreover, Muholi’s performative self-portraits would nicely enter into dialogue with the works of Cindy Sherman and Gillian Wearing CBE included here. As it is now, they are flanked by a soulless portrait of supermodel Winnie Harlow taken by Giovanni Gastel for Glamour magazine (Untitled, 2015). Given Sherman’s flirtatious relationship with the fashion world, Gastel’s portrait isn’t entirely out of place. But it is definitely superfluous.
Sherman may be the uncrowned queen of the masked self-portrait, but I find Wearing far more relevant to our time. The way she uses lifelike silicone masks to transform herself into other people is cold, eerie, and barren. This is certainly reminiscent of the movie Face/Off (1997) and horror films, but Wearing’s stripped-down passport photo aesthetic mainly recalls totalitarianism and dystopia. Yet, there is also something deeply sad about her works, which often feel like attempts to cling to the past. This is also the case with the photographic self-portraits shown here: Me as Eva Hesse(2019), and Cahun and Wearing (2017). As the title suggests, Eva Hesse is resurrected in the former, a commendably unsentimental ode to an influential and talented artist who died tragically young. The latter, in turn, was made for the exhibition Gillian Wearing and Claude Cahun: Behind the mask, another mask, held at the National Portrait Gallery in London in the spring of 2017. As it happens, I saw that show and still remember it as a great initiative.
To my delight, Scacco has also gotten hold of a hypnotic little work by Cahun: Self-portrait with Cat (1927), a photograph silver gelatin print that becomes more frightening the longer I look at it. Next to it is George Hoyningen-Huene’s mesmerising black and white photograph Cecil Beaton as Elinor Glyn (1930), which in this context exemplifies drag culture. Indeed, the insightful choices are many, but so are the failed decisions. Medical masks, for example, have been needlessly grafted in as if they were a last-minute addition, even though it’s been more than four years since Covid imploded our world order and mask manufacturing went through the roof. Italian self-proclaimed “artivist” Laika1954 shows a handful of truly bad and intellectually weak works. In #JENESUISPASUNVIRUS (2020), the pandemic is represented by a Chinese woman wearing a mask and a protective suit. Banksy’s symbolism suddenly seems incredibly profound. It’s also a shame that the parallels between the ritual medical masks of folklore and the surgical masks of Western medicine are glossed over.
The other really big slip-up is the Finnish element. Scacco simply hasn’t familiarised herself enough to make smart choices. For some inexplicable reason, Elina Brotherus is represented with a lot of works that have nothing to do with masks. At most, the documentation of her Erwin Wurm-inspired performance Minute Sculpture (Double Bucket) (2017) would have fit in with the rest here. The same goes for Sami Lukkarinen, who, like Brotherus, almost gets his own little solo exhibition of paintings inside the big one; a couple of works would have sufficed. Marita Liulia’s paintings and interactive installation The Player (2024), created in collaboration with Antti Kuivalainen, don’t fit in either. On the other hand, the omission of paintings by Leonor Ruiz Dubrovin or by the duo Raisa Raekallio & Misha del Val is almost criminal, to name a few artists who have exhibited engaging mask-themed works in well-known galleries in Helsinki.
Luckily, the National Museum of Finland has been able to offer more successful Nordic elements. A Swedish silk mask dated 1790–92 almost makes audible Jacob Anckarström’s greeting to Gustav III before he fired his lethal shot at the fateful masquerade ball in 1792: “Bonsoir, beau masque!” The context creates a tantalising art experience. All these eras jumbled together made me think how unlikely it is that masks are so universal, that across millennia people in so many cultures have donned them – both beautiful and ugly varieties. Then again, the constellation of eyes-nose-mouth is also the very first thing an infant learns to look at and recognise. The face is the original means of communication, whether naked or masked.
