Wuh.ey - “Maskani ya Safari”

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 – “Maskani ya Safari”

A masked man stands in the subway, wrapped in pearls, orange, and gray. He seems to come from another time—or from another consciousness. Between metallic doors and neon lights, his presence seems like a spiritual aberration, a fleeting god in the system of everyday life. "Maskani ya Safari" —the station of the journey—is a portrait of movement, migration, and the silent survival of ritual in the urban present.

The subway, a symbol of modernity and speed, is transformed here into an underground shrine. The mask, once a bearer of spiritual energy, is no longer a symbol of mystery, but of resistance. It protects against the invisibility that urban life brings with it. The body beneath it is anonymous, yet its appearance demands attention—dignity as a gesture, not a pose.

Wuh.ey combines the aesthetics of traditional Yoruba and Fang masks with the coldness of urban architecture. What was once carved from wood and danced in rituals now appears as a silent counterpart in the smooth metal of a metropolis. The beads glow like data points, memory flows through the tunnels of modernity.

The work speaks of identity as a continuous movement. The mask is no longer worn to hide, but to become visible. It is a symbol of a nomadic self that travels through worlds—cultural, spiritual, technological.

"Maskani ya Safari" captures the moment in which tradition doesn't disappear, but rather transforms: from sacred ceremony to urban myth. Between the subway and the subconscious, between noise and silence, a new ritual emerges—the ritual of existence.