Wuh.ey - “Maska ya Fedha”

From the series: African Fusion
Paper: Hahnemühle Fine Art Archival Print
Sheet size: 60 × 60 cm
Year: Edition of 2025
Edition: 3 + 1 AP

Wuh.ey – “Maska ya Fedha”

A woman leans over a table covered with bundles of money. Behind her stands a masked figure, adorned with cowrie shells, beads, and feathers—a guardian, perhaps a spirit. The room appears barren, the walls crumbling, but wealth is piled high on the table. "Maska ya Fedha" —the mask of money—is a painting about power, desire, and the invisible rituals of our time.

Here, Wuh.ey interweaves economics and spirituality, modernity and myth. Money becomes the new fetish, the mask a symbol of ancient authority. In this juxtaposition, the history of value systems is condensed: what was once sacrificed is now valued. The woman, powerful and focused, embodies the rationalized, the order of capital. The mask wearer, on the other hand, bears the irrational, the sacred, the unpredictable.

A silent dialogue develops between them—not a struggle between past and future, but their mutual interpenetration. Money, once born of shells, returns here to its origins: to the magic of exchange, to the idea that value is always also faith.

Wuh.ey stages not a critique, but a revelation. The room is a temple, the arrangement of the bills an altar. The woman's gaze is directed not at the money, but through it – as if she were counting the invisible: power, loss, history.

"Maska ya Fedha" examines the masks we wear to create meaning—in politics, religion, art, and economics. It's a picture about transformation, about how rituals change without disappearing. Capital here is not just a symbol, but a sacrificial offering—to a world that has learned to transform faith into numbers.