Art Hors Contexte: Historicizing African Art Outside its Original Cultural Context

For reasons of war, migration, colonialism and more, works of art from several African communities have found their way into museums, private homes, and locations in other parts of Africa. In their new worlds, the consciousness of their holistic entity is often not realized and, therefore, their artistic and historical identities become ambiguous. This paper draws two examples of art hors contexte. The first is a Yoruba egungun mask on display at the National Museum, Nigeria, and the second is an unusual Yoruba ere-ibeji figure in the Ife-Ana Yoruba community of Togo. This paper aims at identifying the challenges of the art historian in plotting an in-depth historical epistemology of these works of art. The issue to be addressed is: should the art historian continue to engage the egungun mask wholly as African art, as a mémoire of its original entity or as an invention in a modern world where several art forms are part of a western-oriented installation art called a museum? In which case, the museum itself as a whole becomes a work of art. The paper also addresses the position of the historian with regard to the unusual and non-archetypal form of the Ife-Ana ìbejì figure. The figure, if taken out of context and without background information, poses a challenge of identification and, invariably, authentication. This paper will explore how unusual forms and contexts can redefine art or, indeed, unconsciously create new art forms out of existing ones.