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78 CONCEIVING OF FORMS, REVEALING A CULTURE: Design in Africa SITTING, SLEEPING, AND DREAMING If there is one event that Parisian tribal art aficionados eagerly await when autumn is in the air, it is the opening of the Musée Dapper’s annual exhibition. To be sure, the objects are not necessarily so novel. The museum’s holdings have been widely seen since it opened in 1986, and works lent to it by other institutions are not usually hitherto unseen ones. However, the originality of the themes explored and an approach that welcomes the inclusion of contemporary African, Caribbean, and diaspora creations continue to fascinate the public. The present show, conceived of by Christiane Falgayrettes-Leveau, opened on October 10, 2012, and focuses on objects that today, as they have in the past, are used to facilitate rest and sleep: seats, stools, headrests, beds, etc. FIG. 1: Installation view. © Archives Musée Dapper. FIG. 2: Headrest. Teke–Mfinu, DR Congo. Wood, pigment. H: 13 cm. Musée Dapper, Paris, inv. no. 0926. © Archives Musée Dapper. Photo: Hughes Dubois. By Elena Martínez-Jacquet The enthusiast with a sharp memory will recall that the word “dream” was part of the title of the wonderful 1989 exhibition, Supports de Rêve (Dream Holders), which featured nearly eighty headrests from Africa and Oceania, as well as examples from antiquity and Asia. But there is no repetition in this year’s exhibition, the focus of which is primarily on the formal dimension of its objects—not only headrests but also of a variety of other furnishings. The show explores what their particular designs reveal about the social, political, and religious realms from which they originate. Less emphasis is placed on the contexts of use, although these are explained to the extent that they do, to some degree, dictate the conception of an object, each of which must ART on view


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