Shrine: At the Intersection of Object and Spectacle

The Fancy Dress festival takes place annually on the first day the year in the town of Winneba, Ghana. While the masquerade festival started out locally as a searing satire on colonial life, it has since become one of the country’s most popular and well-attended festivals. The masqueraders, who are members of five competing families that vie for the top prize and bragging rights, are judged on originality and presentation and can spend up to a year constructing their ornate costumes in secret.

Ultimately it is the costumes – ranging in their use of materials from woven cloth, knotted netting, faux fur and sequins to tinsel, embroidery, beads and baubles – that form much of the focus of the show. Drawing on those costumes as inspiration, Shrine: At the Intersection of Object and Spectacle, is a collection of new works by artist Na Chainkua Reindorf based entirely on the artist’s imagined collection of objets d’art sourced from a fictional masquerader’s atelier. The works on display therefore follow in West African masquerade traditions, with a specific focus on the elements involved in the construction of costumes and ceremonial dress, highlighting the masqueraders’ dedication to create awe-inspiring pieces that are then revealed in a dramatic fashion.

Shrine, though echoing the spectacular, also quietly reveals itself as a painstakingly slow and meticulous practice. Each ‘tapestry’ has been created using traditional and contemporary weaving techniques, revealing the artist’s hand as deliberate and intentional. The pieces are constructed entirely out of cotton yarn, nylon thread, and hand-polished glass beads, capturing a deconstructed essence of costumes and ceremonial dress from across the West African region where the costumes have been reduced to their most basic elements; color, texture, space and scale. The purposefully limited choice of materials points to the potential of such simple, everyday materials to dazzle, simultaneously exploring ideas of pomp, grandeur, and splendor.

While intended to allow the materials to speak for themselves, Shrine also calls attention to the often “invisible” work done by women. As a meditative and repetitive process, it emphasizes the time, effort, and labor required to realize such a project. And because masquerade traditions have historically excluded women both from their construction and performance, often due to heavily entrenched traditional beliefs, the show is an attempt to claim their long-denied space within the history of a local West African tradition, while contributing to the dynamic body of works by contemporary African women artists.