Thus masked, the world has a language is a group exhibition exploring the masquerade and mask-making traditions across the African diasporas in Mexico, the Caribbean, and the United States. Bridging these geographies, the exhibition will reflect on the mask’s potential as a tool of transformation—both concealing and revealing. In masquerade traditions, either ritual or carnivalesque, the mask is an avatar, a vessel through which truths can be expressed, history can be questioned, and memory can be reactivated.
The exhibition brings together artists whose practices engage with the performative, political, and spiritual dimensions of masking. Through textiles, installation, video, and sculpture, the works examine the mask’s dual role in anonymization and self-expression: its ability to obscure identity while also channelling ancestral presence, complex political history or stories of contemporary joy and pain.
The exhibition will feature works by gallery artists Raphaël Barontini and Lorraine O’Grady, alongside invited artists Nick Cave, Ebony G. Patterson, Darryl Richardson, and Tavares Strachan.
