The Repenters, a show by Hasan and Husain Essop

The Repenters

Mask, as noun and verb, is typically understood as a disguise. We hide our faces behind a mask. Or, we better express ourselves in-and-through a mask. Despite the thrill a mask inspires, it is never merely a prosthetic or artificial extension. This is because we are as much extensions of objects, as objects are extensions of ourselves. Masks are psychological ciphers. In this regard, a potent and often feared cipher is the African mask, largely because it invokes realms beyond the known that defy reason and denote the supernatural. That the culture of masks persists today, reveals its endurance as an otherworldly construct. That they are vitally anthropomorphic, illuminates the degree to which human beings can change themselves, alter the very condition for their being. That they have a mass appeal – in the case of the Hollywood superhero – accounts for their preternatural hold on the global imagination.

As signs of empowerment, masks are never innocent. The question of who is empowered is key – who has the right to wear the mask. The is the question factored into Hasan Essop’s use of the mask. As the artist reminds us – one cannot simply assume a mask and, thereby, embody the power invested therein. This is because bodies, or faces, are never neutral – they are invested with power or powerlessness, strength or weakness. The raced or gendered body is never innocent. Thus, one’s relationship with a mask alters accordingly. Who has the right to wear the mask of spiderman? Simply, the consumer of the mask? Not quite. In Essop’s view, a body that has been encoded negatively – as radically other, as a threat to society – cannot assume that right. Masks come with a cultural order and rule. However, this order and rule needn’t be fixed, especially now, in our revisionist historical moment, in which we find the mask and shield of Captain America worn and borne by a black man.

Still, Essop remains just in reminding us that eugenics-culture-religion continue to perpetrate either inclusion or exclusion. In his masked shifts in persona, it is the non- inclusive nature of the mask that is revealed. His Batman scored with Arabic lettering is deliberately divisive – not because the Arabic script is intrinsically thus but because of the historical and geopolitical weight it carries. Islam in Europe, say, is increasingly perceived as an invasive threat. Faith, after all, is an embodied reality. As such, it is also a mask – a spiritual-cultural projection. In Essop’s estranging portraits, it is the malevolent dissonance that is foregrounded – a non-belonging, defamiliarized displacement, that occurs when a Western mask is worn by a Muslim man. The question Essop raises? To whom does this Hollywood mythology speak? If ‘these fictional characters provide hope and pride to the cultures they represent’, they also ‘have a detrimental effect on the enemies and everything they represent in the story’. That is true. Which is why Good and Evil remain the core of these cinematic entertainments that contain Batman, Spiderman, the Hulk, etc. There is always a core conflict. Essop’s point, however, is that these cinematic visions also negatively impact upon those innocent others, from other cultures, who, despite so-called globalization, will not find their place within the story. But then again, surely what is more important is to weigh the tipping point at which we find ourselves – a point snagged by extremism, accelerated raced-religious-cultural fear, and its counter, a fight for a global empathic humanity. Here, perhaps the new global blockbuster, Monkey Man, which he has also directed and co-authored, provides the enabling antidote that Essop seeks? Inspired by Hanuman, the Hindu monkey God, it twists away from the power of Western Mythology and asks us to embrace the gods of others.