Collection: Molimo

In Anastasie Langu Lawinner’s work, the full-figured female models carrying African masks are also a means to represent the invisible, and the significance of masks in traditional socio-religious life as well as globally. Masks hide or suppress the identity of the wearer in order to help him or her personify a wandering force, spirit or god, charming it with its own image in order to better capture and manipulate it. By putting on a mask, the individual loses his identity to a superior force.
Finally, the bodies of these female nudes become a metaphor of the self-image, and of the way African women, curvy women, construct their own identities independently of the inquisitive gaze.