Gonçalo Mabunda was selected to be featured in the Africa Present: SUPPORT section

Drawing from his heritage centralized in the political locus of Maputo, Gonçalo Mabunda underlines the iconographic essence of transforming arms into art in the context of post-independence Mozambique. Mabunda was born in 1975, during the same period when the country experienced freedom from Portugal, and a civil war that would last a decade and a half. At the age of seven, he first gained contact with the AK-47 belonging to his uncle, a Frelimo soldier. Later he trained in Durban, becoming a select one of 10 Nucléo artists to participate in a church-organized project to creatively transform weaponry. The combination of these formative moments, coupled with the violence of concurrent battle in his nation, drove the influences behind Mabunda’s modernist sculptures forward. Executed with both metal remnants and decommissioned arms, his pieces additionally capture the spirit of liberation close to previous Mozambican masters, including Naguib Elias Abdula, Malangatana Ngwenya, Bertina Lopes, and Naftal Langa. Philosophically evident in Maputo, where Malangatana’s liberty mural in the Heroes’ Square stands beside a monument for the late president Samora Machel, where Mabunda maintains his core studio practice, a lasting legacy of conflict, reflections on its absurdity, and the destruction sacrificed for peace become in tandem enshrined within his shapes. Moreover commenting on the large-scale potential for transformation, Mabunda distills the regality of survival, and the ultimate safety of epic resilience.

He has exhibited at the Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf, the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam, Hayward Gallery in London, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, among others. His work is held in the collections of the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the Brooklyn Museum. Mabunda represented his country in the Mozambique Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale, which expanded his level of international celebration. His work was also included in the 2018 Gangwon International Biennale in South Korea, and in the group show All the World’s Futures at the 2015 Venice Biennale.

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