The Faces Collection

The Faces Collection is an installation that showcases a collection of clay impressions of miniature masks from Congo. With these impressions, Anna Safiatou Touré offers a critical perspective on the place of these cultural and ritual objects within European societies and their institutions. The artwork also addresses the “fetishization” of masks and their own sacralizing museum displays. The Faces Collection fluctuates between satire and homage: the impression highlights the loss of information linked to the journey of these objects, only a trace of their presence remains. The installation also calls attention to the contested presence of hundreds of thousands of Congolese artifacts scattered across Belgium.

Anna Safiatou Touré is a multidisciplinary Franco-Malian artist based in Brussels. Born in Bamako, she left Mali for France at an age too young to retain vivid memories of her homeland. This sense of loss fueled her desire to understand migration, the connections between two lands and cultures, and the relationships between the colonized and colonizers, both past and present. It also enabled her to perceive and decode the “exoticism” that Sub-Saharan Africa continues to evoke in our collective imagination. The exploration of this personal, historical and cultural mixing allows her to fill voids or unanswered spaces. In her own way, the artist seeks to materialize this absence by creating her own evidence to convey history, making absence visible to tell stories through these newly created bodies. Like a poetry of emptiness, shouldn’t the world be told in reverse, like a stencil, on the outline side?