OSTILLO will inaugurate its program with Masquerade, curated by Sacha Zerbib. The exhibition brings together painting, assemblage, sculpture and photography to explore the enduring image of the mask across contemporary artistic practices. Masquerade takes its title from a silkscreen by Glenn Ligon, presented in the exhibition, incorporating fragments from James Baldwin’s ‘Stranger in the Village’. First published in Harper’s Magazine in 1953, the essay recounts Baldwin’s experience in a remote Swiss village. In this unfamiliar setting, as the only Black visitor, Baldwin evokes a local carnival tradition of racial masquerade and reflects on the shifting meanings of Black experiences on both sides of the Atlantic.
From ancient theater to minstrel shows, the mask has long haunted the Western stage, shaping how bodies are seen, performed and interpreted. Across ritual practices, social gatherings, and theatrical forms, it oscillates between concealment and revelation. Detached from the actor’s face and removed from the collector’s wall or ethnographic display, it is reimagined in the studio as a device through which artists probe the unstable terrain of identification, self-fashioning, estrangement and conflict.
Masquerade features work by: Kader Attia, María Berrío, Marlene Dumas, Evan Holloway, Sanya Kantarovsky, Glenn Ligon, Paolo Nazareth, Damián Ortega, Adam Pendleton, Mohammed Sami, Thomas Schütte, Sylvia Snowden, Salman Toor, and Christopher Wool.
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