MUSEUM news 40 SKIN AS A MEANS OF COMMUNICATION Waalwijk—The Leder and Schoenen Museum (Leather and Shoe Museum) in the Netherlands is presenting Skin as a Means of Communication, a fascinating exhibition about how skin can function as an instrument for the transmission of information between people. Brainchild of visual artist Geert de Bruijn, the show explores the signs and symbols inscribed on human skin with tattoos, scarifi cation, and body painting, which usually express information about the wearer’s identity and status. Animal skins and hides, and even tanned or dried leather, also serve as a means of communication and are an essential part of the makeup of a vast number of objects that are used to convey messages. These range from African drums and shields to Indonesian Wayang marionettes. Many of the objects on display were collected by de Bruijn himself, while others are on loan from various private and public institutions, such as the Allard Pierson Museum, the Noordbrabants Museum, and the Wereldmuseum. The exhibition will be on view until May 16, 2016. ABOVE: Display of tattoo art at the exhibition Skin as a Means of Communication. © Leder and Schoenen Museum, The Netherlands. LEFT: Helmet mask. Mbembe, Nigeria. © Leder and Schoenen Museum, The Netherlands. LEFT: Installation view of L’Europe fantôme at Mu.ZEE in Ostende. Photo: Steven Decroos. BELOW: Patrick Wokmeni, image from L’Europe fantôme series. 2015. © Photo: Patrick Wokmeni. PHANTOM EUROPE Ostende—Mu.ZEE is hosting an exhibition that puts its visitors on the other side of the mirror. Its title, L’Europe fantôme, is an inversion of that of Michel Leiris’ wellknown work L’Afrique fantôme (Phantom Africa), his journals of the Dakar-Djibouti mission of 1931–1933. On view until January 3, L’Europe fantôme analyzes the representation of African art in Western societies in the twentieth century. The exhibition developed from a dialog with artist Sammy Baloji (Lubumbashi, 1978) that began in 2014, and it refl ects on and evaluates the Western museum model, which is quintessentially representative of the imperialism of the colonial period. That past is one that has been hard for it to shed, despite the fact that the clamor for change goes back more than a century, even predating Guillaume Apollinaire’s 1908 essay Sur les musées (On Museums). Tracing a historical sequence beginning with the Berlin Conference on the Congo of 1885 to the presentation of the Belgian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2015, the exhibition’s discourse is supported by various kinds of documentation such as photographs and publications, as well as by a selection of forty-fi ve works from the collections of the Musée Royal de l’Afrique Centrale in Tervuren. Representative of the views on the arts of Africa held by twentieth-century intellectuals such as Vladimir Markov, Carl Einstein, Michel Leiris, and many others, the works chosen for L’Europe fantôme emerge in a new light here. This is especially true of the photographs taken by Cameroonian artist Patrick Wokmeni, whose work deals with issues of identity and politics. The exhibition also examines the visions of anti-colonial writers and thinkers such as Aimé Césaire, Cheikh Anta Diop, Édouard Glissant, and Chinua Achebe.
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