Head of Dreams: 10 Antique African Headrests

Coinciding with Raymond Fuyana’s solo exhibition, Head of Dreams presents a curated selection of 10 exceptional antique African headrests. Used across numerous African cultures, they protected elaborate hairstyles, cradled the neck, and kept the sleeper cool through the night while lifting its head from the ground. Carved from a single block of wood, these elegant sculptures were never mere utilitarian pillows – they also functioned as objects of protection, prestige, and identity. Beyond their practical role, these headrests were imbued with symbolic meaning. The head, the seat of consciousness, found rest upon a carved object that carried protective significance during the time the subconscious reigned. The headrests’ owners entrusted them with their most vulnerable hours: the hours of sleep, of dreams. Head of Dreams takes its title from their dual nature: the head, seat of thought, and the dream, realm of imagination, coming together on the headrest. 

Each headrest tells its own story. Some reveal the precision of geometric design, others the talent of a sculptor’s craftsmanship, or his creative use of a ready-made piece of wood. Their proportions are never accidental - each curve and line is guided by both ergonomic purpose and aesthetic instinct. The variation in forms is astounding: figurative, amorphous, anthropomorphic or animal-like. Across regions and traditions, the sculptor’s hand transformed a functional necessity into a clearly recognizable marker of identity, making it possible for us to attribute each example to a certain culture. 

The surfaces of these headrests, polished smooth by years of use, tell the story of countless nights. Their deep patina was shaped by the accumulation of touch, oil, and time, softening the wood to a warm glow. Headrest aficionados have long recognized that this patina carries as much value as its form. It embodies what Walter Benjamin, in his 1935 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, called “the presence in time and space, the unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” The “aura”, as Benjamin called it, of these objects lies precisely in this lived presence - in the way object, use, and memory converge to form a tangible and unique “unreproducible” record of human experience. 

To collect African headrests is therefore to cherish fragments of the human condition. These works bridge function and form, showing even a humble pillow can have an artful presence. Exhibited together, these headrests speak to a long, pan-African history of design. They stand comfortably beside the most refined examples of modern sculpture, echoing the concerns of Brancusi, Noguchi, or Moore, yet often preceding them – the oldest example in the exhibition, found in Nigeria’s Calabar region and made in terracotta, being more than a thousand years old! 

In Head of Dreams, Duende Art Projects presents this selection of antique African headrests in dialogue with the dreamlike paintings of Zimbabwean artist Raymond Fuyana. While Fuyana’s canvases open portals into inner worlds where memory and emotion merge, these headrests embody the stillness that precedes such dreams. One invites us to see; the other to rest. Together they trace a continuum of human creativity - from the silent intimacy of nightly sleep to the expansive freedom of a contemporary artist’s imagination.

Some of the headrests possess a surrealist quality of their own: almost human or animal-like in their presence, they seem animated by the dreams they once supported. Others reveal a striking architectural sensibility, their balanced compositions echoing the structural logic of Fuyana’s imagined spaces. Chairs and couches often appear in his paintings as zones of rest - the artist’s own comfort zones, places where he can relax and his inner worlds unfold. In this way, both the headrests and Fuyana’s interiors become sites of transition between body and mind, rest and reverie, architecture and dream - mirroring each other across time, material, and imagination.

As visitors move between the two parallel exhibitions, they will pass from the realm of carved sculptures to that of painted visions, from the tangible object that supports the dreamer’s head to the images that arise within that dreaming mind. The dialogue between the two shows reveals how, across time and medium, art remains a vessel for dreaming and reflection. These headrests - once witnesses to private dreams - invite us to imagine anew: to consider how design, memory, and beauty intertwine in these exquisite artworks. Their distilled design and universal human resonance affirm their place within the canon of world art. These headrests remind us that every dream begins with a place to rest one’s head: a small sculpture holding both the weight of the body and the lightness of imagination.