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The composite object chosen by Patrick Mudekereza is intriguing:
in the context of which commission or for what reason did a Belgian artist who had never travelled to the Congo produce this hybrid work?
Where did the carved tusks come from, and what artist(s) were involved in carving them?
In fact, the two pieces of ivory seem to have been sculpted by different artists.
Over time these African artists faded into oblivion. Aside from the name of the Belgian sculptor and the donor, we have no information on the context surrounding this object.
The work entiteled L’Art au Congo has no real ‘passport’ and defies the conventional categories within the museum’s collections. Although the bronze and the tusks were given the same inventory number, they were stored in different places.
The fact that it is doubly anonymous appealed to Patrick Mudekereza, as did its twofold hybridity, being both Belgian and African, with African motifs suggesting a European-commissioned work.
From a contemporary prespective, the artist has freely reinterpreted the images carved on the two tusks as a narrative, a sort of silent comic book, bringing it back to life through a literary text.
This reflection on the hybrid nature of the object has elicited new scholarly interest and surfaced the sculpture out of the storage room where it had been slumbering for many years.
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