The Mask Never Lies
By Charlotte Stace
The CCCB’s new exhibition, The Mask Never Lies, takes us on a journey through the political uses of masks in modern society.
It looks at the politics of how faces are controlled, cultural resistance to identification, the defence of anonymity, the strategies of terror in the act of concealment, and the way in which bad guys, heroes or heroines and dissidents use masks as a symbol of identity. Our world cannot be understood without masks, even less so nowadays, when a pandemic has forced us to live behind them.
Inspired by the essay Certain dark and dangerous things: The book of masks and the masked by Servando Rocha, this exhibition offers an underground history of the last century and a half under the sign of a de-sacralised mask, one that infiltrates the political landscape as an instrument at the service of perverse exercises of power or as a tool for constructing identity in political activism and social struggles.