Barcelona Metropolis

And exhaustive, here, can also mean contradictory. Because a mask can hide the identity of both the villain who wants to commit evil acts without being held accountable by the justice system and the hero who wants to prevent them from doing so. Likewise, rebels wear masks to avoid being crushed by tyranny, while tyrants’ henchmen also cover their faces to crush opponents more easily. This is not a paradox: it is simply the versatility of something so familiar to us that can be used for everything. There are masks used for reinforcing and ritually perpetuating a meaning and a world order, like those used in Masonic lodge ceremonies, and others that aim to take a world order apart and show that nothing has meaning, as in the case of Marcel Janco and the Dadaist shows at the Cabaret Voltaire.

Seven areas

The exhibition is divided into seven areas. Though each of them has a more historical or political, artistic, anthropological, activist, or even pandemic-oriented angle, all of the areas present recurring motifs and deal with similar themes. And they do so from opposing yet complementary perspectives: the Ku Klux Klan’s racism, the Watchmen comic and series, the literary character Fantômas, the art of Magritte and Carrington, Pussy Riot and their balaclavas as they played and danced to punk music at Saint Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow, the eye-catching masks worn by Mexican luchadores, the protests led by Anonymous, the omnipresence of surgical masks due to Covid-19… The exhibition thus establishes an audiovisual, textual and iconographic dialogue around reworkings and manipulations of identity, around individuals’ relationships with power, around the infinite forms terror can take and around the sophistries of resistance.

In all honesty, it is striking, disturbing even, to see how polymorphic the mask as an object can be. It is everything, it can be everything, it can be used for everything: as a tool to exercise power brutally with impunity (like the hoods and tunics worn by the Ku Klux Klan); as an instrument to protect against the enemy’s weapons (WWI gas masks) or the carnage of a pandemic; as a way of invoking fantastical or atavistic realities (the demon masks seen at certain popular festivals in Catalonia); as a strategy to maintain anonymity and dodge increasingly all-embracing, invasive powers (the hoods used at feminist protests); as an attempt to reconstruct a disfigured physical identity, which, at the same time, is also a devastated moral and emotional identity (the facial prosthetics used for soldiers who were mutilated in the trenches); and for a host of other purposes. I have already said it: a mask is everything, it can be everything.

We might think otherwise – day to day, it is soothing to think otherwise – but masks are just as human as faces, even when they dehumanise us, when they make us transcendental, or monstrous, or heroic, or clandestine, or unique, or generic. Masks are human even when they dehumanise us, because after all, inhumanity is also part of the human condition.