exhibition "Treasures of Africa" Keywords:, African culture, rock art, masks and sculptures, Center for African Culture

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in original and unique African art in the world. In a number of European and American cities, museums and art galleries displaying works by African masters are open and enjoy constant success, and catalogues of public and private collections are published.

In Russia, examples of African art are displayed in the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography and the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. In Moscow - in the Museum of Oriental Art and the Museum of Anthropology at Moscow State University, as well as in a number of private collections.

Almost all of these artifacts are inaccessible to both the general public and researchers. For example, the Moscow State University collection, founded in the 19th century, is kept in sealed boxes.

In May of last year, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev Medvedev supported the proposal to create a center for African culture in Moscow.

It means that this Center will stimulate interest in Africa in Russia and intensify cultural, humanitarian and educational cooperation with the countries of the continent. It will become a permanent museum of traditional and contemporary African art and a venue for exhibitions from foreign and domestic collections. It is supposed to host scientific conferences and meetings with African delegations. It is also planned to create an International Club of African Artists, which will, among other things, support the training of qualified specialists in the art of Africa. Scientific leadership will be provided by the Board of Trustees, which will include Russian public figures and experts on Africa.

As part of the project to create the Center for African Art, the exhibition "Treasures of Africa" was recently held in Moscow, where photographs of the writer and cinematographer N. A. Sologubovsky and the leading researcher of the Institute of Fine Arts of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary A. B. Podtserob were presented. The exhibition also featured photographs of rock art from the Libyan Sahara, as well as artifacts from the personal collections of Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary V. E. Egoshkin " Ritual Masks of Central Africa "and"Modern Wooden Sculpture of Kenya".

Thousands of drawings and petroglyphs have been found in the Sahara, this Great Desert of the world, many of which are included in the UNESCO World Heritage List. Thanks to Russian researchers, we got the opportunity to get acquainted with them. The photos displayed at the exhibition were taken in a remote location.-

sub-Saharan Africa. Members of the expedition went into vast expanses, moving off-road for many hundreds of kilometers from oases and asphalt, making their way through huge dunes - up to 200 - 300 m high-and getting into samums - a burning wind from the desert.

In December 2005, A. B. Podtserob and N. A. Sologubovsky led a group of Russians who reached the center of the most inaccessible area of the Great Desert - Erga Murzuk. They managed to explore three huge "open-air museums" located in the Akakus Mountains, in the dry beds of the Mathandoush River and in the little-studied Libyan part of the Uweinat mountain range. The frescoes and engravings found in these "museums" form a thread that connects us with people who lived many millennia ago.

The photos displayed in the exhibition represent a kind of report on the life that was in full swing in the Sahara in ancient times, when deep rivers flowed through the current desert and it was covered with forests and palm groves. There were large herbivores - elephants, rhinos, hippos, and large predators - lions, panthers, and crocodiles. Now, in place of this "earthly paradise", there are only endless ridges of dunes, scorched by the merciless sun.

The exhibition featured photographs of drawings depicting the Garamantes, a people who founded a state in Fezzan, this formidable and indomitable Libyan desert, in the IX century BC, which lasted for one and a half thousand years.

The civilization created by the Garamantes was a unique phenomenon for antiquity. The gallery of photo portraits of desert people, whether they are the lords of the vast expanses of the Tuareg or the inhabitants of oases, also attracted the attention of visitors.

At the opening of the exhibition, N. A. Sologubovsky's film "Louvre under the Open Sky" was shown, which is the first Russian documentary about rock art in the Libyan Sahara. Those present were also able to get acquainted with the book by A. B. Podtserob "The Boundless expanses of the Sahara" (Moscow, Byblos Consulting, 2010).

Getting acquainted with the photo exhibition allowed visitors to be transported to a special world - a world where people feel like they are on another planet, in another dimension, where silent sands and stones stretch for thousands of kilometers, where the sun and wind dominate the vast expanses, where the distance traveled is measured not in kilometers, but in travel time. This is a world where the traveler finds himself one - on-one not just with nature, but with infinity, with space, where the traces left by peoples who once lived make you physically feel the course of thousands of years, inexorably carrying tribes, kingdoms, cultures, civilizations into oblivion.

While the photo exhibition dealt with the vast region of North Africa and was primarily associated with its ancient history, the other two expositions gave an insight into the art of today's Central and East Africa, both traditional and modern.

The wooden ritual masks that visitors could see were made by unknown craftsmen not for tourists, as is often the case with many African collections, but for their own consumption. They were often used for performing ritual rituals - circumcision, celebrating the harvest, asking for rain, praying for the birth of a child, etc. Many of them were taken from the eastern regions of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which were engulfed in civil strife in recent years. Among them, worn masks of the Lega tribe from many years of use, artifacts of the Congolese Luba, Sangye, Pembe tribes and a number of others are presented. The mask used in the circumcision ceremony of the Mbunda tribe living in Zambia and Angola is expressive. All these masks, made of soft wood, are by no means decorative. They feel an unknown force that conquers the attentive viewer.

The exhibition of sculptures made in the workshop of Mutambi, a Kenyan woodcarver, aroused great interest among visitors. These are nude figures made of solid wood almost as tall as a man, depicting members of the same Kikuyu family sitting on the ground. Here is the head of the family-Mzee (elder), telling something to the young people around him. The image of Mzee, the elder narrator, is quite typical of Kikuyu art. Nearby - mothers nursing babies, older children-boys and girls listening to the elder. Each figure cut from a single piece of wood looks very realistic and natural, despite the presence of some conventions in the image. Fascinated viewers said that sometimes our professional sculptors would do well to learn naturalness from the Africans.

In our country, African culture is not so widely known, and this is why the exhibition "Treasures of Africa" can be considered a significant event. It seems that the Center for African Art could also have permanent exhibits from the personal collections of Russian Africanists.

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