A new exhibit shows how Malawi’s Chewa people are using an ancient art form to address a modern epidemic.

Crouched in front of jungle foliage, a three-horned beast with a pustule-covered face wields a weapon that’s part club, part axe. This is Kondolo; or rather, a masked dancer interpreting the spirit of Kondolo. Its grotesque, crimson-painted head and cascading suit of tattered rags represent a young braggart returning from the Ndola copper mines of Zambia, bringing back to his rural Malawi village not the promised fortune but an HIV infection. He is just one of a range of characters created by Malawi’s Chewa people as a response to the AIDS pandemic ravaging their community.

This alarming entity was captured by Vancouver photographer Douglas Curran, and is one of nine life-size portraits of masked spirit dancers installed at the Museum of Anthropology for the exhibit The Village Is Tilting: Dancing AIDS in Malawi (which opens Tuesday [February 6] and runs to September 3). Eleven carved wooden masks from Curran’s collection, gathered during a decade of friendship and study among the Chewa people, complement the images. As an initiated member of the Nyau men’s society that oversees these traditions, Curran is the rare foreigner allowed to own them.

Like so much of sub-Saharan Africa, Malawians face daunting rates of AIDS infection; numbers in the range of 16 to 20 percent of the population are common, and some areas are much more heavily hit. From screening videotaped interviews with villagers whose lives have been affected by a disease so inescapable it’s said to be “in the maize flour” to displaying a mask named Sudden Death against a backdrop the colour of dried blood, Curran aims to immerse museum visitors in the Chewa’s dialogue around the epidemic within the context of their cosmology.

“We wanted, in effect, to create a facsimile of the spirit world,” he says, showing the Straight around the matte-red room before the exhibit’s mounting. “Everything will float in space at odd angles, and even the [photographic] images will be cut so that the horizon lines are distorted and upset, so that there’s an element of disequilibrium.”

For more than a millennium, the Chewa have practised the Gule Wamkulu (“Great Dance”), and in its contemporary form, the other spirit-characters performers embody at village gatherings are just as disturbing and revealing as Kondolo. There’s Bwindi, the philanderer, a leering lecher with a receding hairline who is often dressed in a suit jacket to indicate his paying job. This means he is able to seduce young women with the promise of goods outside the barter economy, inevitably leaving them pregnant. Most tragically realistic are two masks directly depicting people with AIDS. Atsale Adzemange (“May the Survivors Prevail”) features the head of an AIDS carrier so enlarged it makes the wearer’s body look wasted, while Edzi Wafika (“AIDS Has Come”) shows the sunken cheeks and temples of a person in the advanced stages of the disease. Curran points out that these are not meant to stigmatize the sick but to warn villagers about AIDS’s appearance and effects.

“The first thing the exhibit has to do is demonstrate that Africans are not passive observers of their own fate,” says Curran. “They are conscious, they are aware, and they have ways of talking within their own community.” The masks are a kind of shorthand for layered meanings that must be explained to outsiders but are familiar to any Malawian. “You see that they [the masks] actually talk about issues of gender empowerment, economic opportunity, levels of oppression—all of these things. In the West, we tend to view AIDS from the viewpoint of a problem of sex and morality; in Africa the disease is, by and large, inextricable from the conditions of poverty.”

The Chewa’s masked spirit dances address all aspects of society, and the appearance of AIDS is not their first brush with decimating disease. The Imfa Sitelo (“Sudden Death”) entity, for example, is the contemporary incarnation of the community’s 1920s response to the worldwide influenza epidemic but now comments on the more relevant affliction. Strangely, the Chewa believed this newly revived mask (on view in the exhibit) had such a powerfully disruptive influence on their community that Curran, as a white man unable to be bewitched, was asked to take it away to Canada.

Curran, who guest-curated the exhibit, will give a talk about his photographs and experiences at the museum on February 13, and a three-day dialogue with Chewa representatives about Africa and AIDS will follow in April. (Check www.moa.ubc.ca/ for details.) For Curran, the most important function of the installation is to humanize the African AIDS crisis for westerners. “Many of us who spend time there want to try and protect Africa from the worst prejudices of the West,” he explains. “We want to prevent Africa from being written off, either because it’s considered a waste of time or it’s too dreadful to look at. You need to find a way of showing…that there is incredible strength and resiliency amongst these people.”