Bwa mask, Burkina Faso | 非洲布基纳法索布瓦面具

In a photograph taken circa 1960, which immortalizes a part of the Josef Mueller collection, one sculpture particularly stands out, adorning the ridge beam of his house in Solothurn: the archaic Bwa "knife mask", celebrated as one of the masterpieces of the Voltaic people.

The southern Bwa, or Nyaynegay, borrowed the tradition of wooden masks from their Gurunsi neighbours. Unlike the leaf masks related to the cult of the supreme god Do, the latter are associated with myths that recount the genesis of the clans and lineages that structure the communities among as expressive in dance. The corpus is divided between zoomorphic representations - symbolising the powers of the founding ancestors - and an iconography that is abstract in appearance and is present in the prodigious knife masks. According to Daniela Bognolo (Falgayrettes-Leveau, Animal, op.cit., p. 199), the nwantantay were the archetype of wooden masks. Their elaboration thus associates certain key elements of the myth of creation, drawn from the Do, and signs tailoring each mask to the personal history of the clan ancestor, whose emblem it is.

The monumental and polychromatic art of the Voltaic peoples came relatively late into Western collections. Amongst the rare nwantantay on record before the late 1950s are those collected circa 1930 by Henri Labouret, now kept in the musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac, and that of the Barbier-Mueller collections (inv. no. 1005-10), acquired, like this one, from Emile Storrer in 1953. Here, the refinement of the structure and its ornamentation, the elegance of the motifs and their combination, as well as the marks of its long use before acquisition confirm the great antiquity of this piece. These archaic masks were kept between performances near an altar embodying the spiritual power of masks (Christopher Roy, Art of the Upper Volta Rivers, Meudon, 1987, p. 292).