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30 Top: Sanza, giangbwa. Zande, Uele, DR Congo. MRAC collection, M0.0.7602. © MRAC, Tervuren. Photo: R. Asselberghs. Right and behind: Guido Gryseels, director of the MRAC and a view of the museum. © MRAC, Tervuren. Photos: Jo Van de Vyver. The Musée Royal d’Afrique Centrale at BRAFA: Three questions for Guido Gryseels The Roi Baudoin Foundation and the Theatre de la Monnaie have both been invited in past years to be guests of honor at the prestigious BRAFA antiques show in Brussels. This year, it’s the Musée Royal d’Afrique Centrale’s turn to be in the spotlight. We asked Guido Gryseels, the venerable museum’s director, about what this involvement means for the museum. Tribal Art Magazine: This is the first time that the museum you head will be present at a commercial art show, and as guest of honor no less. What does this mean to your institution, and what do you expect from it? Guido Gryseels: This invitation is indicative of the social and cultural role that museums such as the MRAC represent in the Belgian cultural landscape. As such, we are delighted that the organizers of BRAFA have seen fit to host us, and all the more so because the show will closely follow an important date for us—on December 2, the museum will close its doors for extensive renovations that are scheduled to take three years. We intend to take advantage of this opportunity to share with BRAFA’s visitors the questions we are asking ourselves about the museum of tomorrow, which we hope will be a place of memory, a space for encounters relating to African art and culture, and a bridge between generations, including those of contemporary Africa. We hope that the collection will serve as a strong connection between the institution and its public. T. A. M.: What will visitors see in your booth? G. G.: During BRAFA, the MRAC will have a 350-square-meter space in which it will show unique objects, including some of the museum’s most celebrated pieces that have done so much to garner the renown the institution enjoys. These will be augmented by some lesser-known works, which are nonetheless decidedly impressive or unique, whether for sculptural reasons or for their histories. The exhibition will be divided into four parts. The first will examine fantastical notions that the West constructed around certain African artworks reflecting interpretations that owe everything to the strange complexity of the belief systems they were thought to represent. In the second part, viewers will see the surprising qualities of certain objects that by virtue of their scale, form, or the way they’re made, stray from the classic image one might have of African art, but also reveal certain dimensions of this unusual universe. A third section will be devoted to stories, sometimes modest and sometimes epic, about the collections and will include accounts of collecting and collectors. The final part of the exhibit will explore the physical world of music—that is to say, musical instruments—but will also include audio recordings of the sounds these instruments produce. We want to emphasize in this installation that the MRAC is an institution with an encyclopedic purpose. It is probably one of the only museums in Europe that is devoted to the study of the African continent from so many points of view: archaeological, historical, cultural, linguistic, artistic, environmental, geological, botanical, and even zoological. We have even decided to include a few zoological and geological specimens in our presentation, whose uniqueness or aesthetic qualities we think our visitors will find surprising. T. A. M.: How do you see the relationship between museums and the art market in the field of tribal art? G. G.: Museums have always had relationships with dealers and that is certainly a good thing. In the area of the non-European arts, however, certain questions arise that are specific to the field and are often delicate from an ethical point of view because the works involved come from peoples who for the most part still exist but whose artists never used to sign their work. To avoid the kinds of abuses that took place in the past in the trade for these arts, today there are rules set forth by the International Council of Museums, of which we are a member, that dealers, collectors, and museums alike need to respect. We make it a point of honor to acquire only those works for which adequate and necessary documentation is available.


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