DOGON – MEISTERWERKE DER SKULPTUR / CHEFS-D’OEUVRE DE LA STATUAIRE DOGON

Description

It is on the steep slopes of Bandiagara cliffs between the high plateau and savannah of Mali in West Africa, lies the Dogon people. It consists of several clans that meets a common founding myth. The history of this community that still lives today in the heart of religious traditions, art and social is long over 900 years. But this autonomous culture is threatened to disappear in the coming years will amplify climate issues, the rural exodus, the civilization of the pressures with cultural ruptures that necessarily involves the growing Islamization. While ethnological science tries to fix and maintain all that can still be, this exhibition aims to give the public the opportunity to discover the art masterpieces of a culture that was ranked in 1989 by UNESCO world cultural heritage. Masterpieces of the Dogon statuary Djennenke the statues – the Nongom Tellem statues and statues are fundamental elements of an animistic religion in which the forces of natural reality presented themselves as human appearances. Since there are more animist priest, the tradition of the essence of this religion is lost. That is why these sculptures, which will keep forever the secret of their meaning, are, next to the village architecture, the only witnesses of a once highly evolved civilization. They differ from totem fetishes we know in African ethnology by their undeniable autonomy and a willingness to stylization is indeed that of artists at work. Largely and essentially the catalog of the exhibition is devoted to wooden works of the Dogon and Tellem, the people that preceded them. These are works which are among the most important of the African artistic production, and thus enter a world history of art.