Oh no, not me

Masks and costumes, primarily reproduced from collections housed in Western museums, are remade by weaving together single-use plastic bags. Manufactured in China and distributed globally, these bags serve as markers of contemporary systems of mass production, consumption, and environmental degradation. Their use draws a direct line from colonial-era extraction to present-day global trade networks.

The masks are displayed on wooden stands constructed from sections of a recreated Rietveld chair, an icon of Dutch modernist design. This juxtaposition stages a layered confrontation between European aesthetic authority and the ongoing consequences of cultural displacement.

The sculptures construct a visual and material analogy between the plastic bag, which transports goods from one site to another, and the masks, now severed from its cultural and geographic context and recast as a museum artifact or market commodity. Both objects, mass-produced packaging and ritual object, are suspended in systems of circulation that strip them of specificity and reframe them within global economies of value.

This series of masks was first exhibited in 500 Years, an exhibition comprising three interrelated bodies of work. Taking the lifespan of a plastic bag as a historical period, the work does not look forward but turns back, mapping a trajectory from the early colonization of the Americas through the European Renaissance to the processes of industrialization and globalization that structure contemporary life. By collapsing these timelines, the work reveals how material culture continues to embody the residues of empire and uneven modernity.