Duende Art Projects

Technique: Anonymous Luba artist D.R. Congo, Early 20th century Wood. 57 x 29 x 13 cm Provenance Galerie Ombre/Olivier Larroque, Nimes, France Udo & Wally Horstmann, Zug, Switzerland Craig De Lora, Clifton, New Jersey, USA, 2009 Bruno Claessens, Antwerp, Belgium, 2009-2023 Duende Art Projects, Antwerp, Belgium, 2023

Authenticité: Certificat fourni

Édition: oeuvre unique

Luba Double Bowl

This double Luba bowl is a unique design with no second example known like it. Carved from a single piece of the typical light wood used by Luba sculptors, two different sized bowl are part of a rectangular slab supported by four feet. Besides the typical blackened light wood (ricinodendron), the geometric decorations at the outer rim of the bowls identifies this exceptional tour-de-force as Luba. While no precise information of the use of this bowl has been recorded, it probably once contained the white pigment used by diviners during spirit possession sessions. Diviners were the master problem solvers of Luba society, addressing crises and conflicts that threatened individual and communal well-being. Kings and chiefs had personal diviners whom they consulted on a regular base. Diviners used baskets, gourds, and sculptures as mnemonic devices to remind them of certain general rubrics of Luba culture, through which they could classify specific behavior. Among the most important of their instruments was the sculpted image of a woman holding a similar bowl. Diviners displayed such figures during consultations to honor the wives of their possessing spirits. The representation of the spirits wife in sculptural form underscored the role of the diviner’s actual wife as an intermediary in the process of invocation and consultation and reinforces the Luba notion of women as spirit-containers. Among its diverse powers, the bowl-figure was known to have curative capacities. The diviner would mix a pinch of kaolin from the figure’s bowl with medical substances that would be administered to patients. Possibly this double bowl functioned in such a ritual context.