Artist · Benin
Romuald Hazoumè
Romuald Hazoumè (born 1962) is a Beninese artist from Porto-Novo. Since the 1980s he has made "masks" from the plastic jerrycans used across Benin to carry water and smuggled petrol, turning a cheap object into faces full of character and into a commentary on consumption, trade and exploitation. His installation La Bouche du Roi, a slave ship made of 304 masks, was acquired by the British Museum in 2007. He works in sculpture, installation, painting and photography.
Updated 2 min read
Romuald Hazoumè was born in Porto-Novo, Benin's capital, in 1962, into a Yoruba family. He began making masks from discarded plastic jerrycans in the mid-1980s. In Benin these containers are everywhere: they carry water, oil and, above all, petrol smuggled across the border from Nigeria on motorbikes piled high with cans.
By cutting, bending and adding a few found objects — wire, combs, cassette tape, feathers — he turns each can into a face with its own personality, often named after people he knows. The masks are funny and expressive, but they also make a point: they answer the Western taste for "authentic" African masks with an object made from the waste of global consumption, and they speak of the dangerous trade in fuel and of how Africa's resources are taken.
His most ambitious work, La Bouche du Roi (1997–2005), arranges 304 jerrycan masks in the shape of the Brookes, the British slave ship whose diagram became an icon of the abolition campaign, with sounds, smells and objects that recall the Atlantic slave trade and its present-day echoes. It was conceived in 1997; one source says it was first shown in Cotonou in 1999, and the Musée du quai Branly says it was presented at the Menil Collection in Houston in 2005. The British Museum bought it, with help from the Art Fund, for the bicentenary of the abolition of the British slave trade in 2007, and displayed it from 22 March to 13 May 2007, before a two-year tour of Hull, Liverpool, Bristol, Newcastle and London. Each mask represents a slave, except two that depict kings; the work reworks the 1789 image of the Brookes.
How to look at it: first, find the faces. Each can has its own expression, and the effect of 304 of them in rows is of individuals reduced to cargo. Then notice what the masks are made of, since the plastic and the petrol are the contemporary trade the title points to. That reading is the site's own. The Musée du quai Branly in Paris has also shown the work and published on it, so it is a good place to ask about displays. See African masks, contemporary African art and our list of Beninese artists.
