The past meets the present in carved tree roots and refashioned Mozambican civil-war weapons as a new generation builds on the nation’s rich legacy of art
• The past meets the present in carved tree roots and refashioned civil war weapons as a new generation builds on the nation’s rich legacy of art
In an overflowing scrapyard behind Karl Marx Avenue in Maputo, faces stare out from twisted metal. Among mortars, spent cartridges and spoked wheels — raw materials in Gonçalo Mabunda’s open-air studio in Maputo — are the anthropomorphic thrones and masks that the artist has refashioned from guns and rocket launchers.
Born in 1975, the year of Mozambique’s independence from Portugal, Mabunda was only seven when he first felt the weight of an AK-47. It belonged to his uncle, a Frelimo government soldier.
He has recycled “thousands of weapons and millions of bullets” in the 20 years since he began making art out of decommissioned weapons from the civil war of 1977-92.
Mabunda was the first Mozambican artist at the Venice Biennale, in 2015. He has two thrones exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in London, where his fourth solo show has just ended at the Jack Bell Gallery.
Twenty-five years after the end of the civil war, Mabunda is in the vanguard of Mozambican artists who are catching the eye of international collectors.
Yet those who grew up after independence, including Mabunda and the photographer Mário Macilau, are heirs to a founding generation that straddled colonial times.
Several of the 58 artists at the National Museum of Art have died in recent years, including the painters Malangatana Ngwenya (1936-2011) and Bertina Lopes (1924-2012) and sculptor Naftal Langa (1932-2014).
That generation’s role in nation-building is evident in Maputo. Ngwenya’s epic mural of the liberation war is on Mozambican Heroes’ Square, where the remains of Samora Machel, the president killed in an aircraft crash, are interred in a shrine under armed guard.
A more intimate Ngwenya mural is in the shaded grounds of the Natural History Museum. A later muralist, Naguib Elias Abdula, 62, created Ode to Machel on the seafront.
If Ngwenya is the father of Mozambican modernist painting, Alberto Chissano, an unschooled artisan who once worked as a migrant farm labourer, is his influential peer in sculpture. His house in Matola is now the Chissano Museum.
HIS GROUPS OF ELONGATED FIGURES AND ENLARGED HEADS REVEAL TENDERNESS AND ENDURANCE
Like his modernist Christ with a pauper’s face, his groups of elongated figures and enlarged heads, sculpted from pieces of wood, reveal tenderness and endurance.
His last completed piece is a surprisingly tranquil visage of a woman with corn rows.
The family museum, which does not receive government support, also houses Chissano’s collection of Mozambican art.
Artists nowadays are used to supporting each other.
The collective Nucléo de Arte, founded in 1921, has galleries, studios and a bar with a relaxed Rasta vibe. Here, Mabunda says, he found odd jobs when his mother, a veg- etable seller, lacked money for school. He trained in Durban in 1994 and became one of 10 Nucléo artists chosen for the church-led project turning arms into art.
While his masks and thrones give an ironic nod to ethnographic collections, his latest show, Emperor of the Sands, is a critique of the development of seafront land.
The art in Mabunda’s house ranges from Chissano and Miró (1965-2002), a once-forgotten Mozambican sculptor who is “the hero of a new generation”, to Bata’s ethereally beautiful silver masks harbouring keys and circuit boards, and photographs by Filipe Branquinho, a student of the country’s late photographic master Ricardo Rangel. Tilandia, a private gallery in Polana, represents artists such as Mabunda, Bata and Estevão Mucavele, 76, whose symbolic pointillist landscapes are in the National Art Museum.
A younger collective, Kulungwana, has been based since 2008 in the elegant waiting room of Maputo’s Central Train Station, built by Gustave Eiffel. Foreign cultural centres also lend vital space to contemporary art.
An exhibition wall in a design shop, Machamba Criativa, opened in March within the Franco-Mozambican centre in the 1917 Hotel Clube.
The Portuguese Camoes Institute showed Interior Landscapes by the architect-trained Branquinho in 2016.
His photos in public buildings evoke the history of a once iniquitously divided, now often dilapidated, postcolonial city — viewed with clarity and love, not nostalgia.
“We need more galleries,” says Mabunda. “There’s a lot happening, but not enough space to support the number of artists in the country.”
Later in 2017, he is opening a co-owned art space, Gallery 1834. The inaugural exhibition will be new Mucavele paintings.
Mabunda suggests that the “government can help artists open up spaces”. Amid an oil and gas boom, “they can make companies buy art” with incentives to invest. Mozambique’s artisans have untapped potential, he adds, citing the progress of Bata in metal.
A leader in wood carving is Dino Jethá, 39, whose solo show, On the Streets of Maputo, was held at the Fernando Leite Couto Foundation in 2017.
Its painted-wood miniature maquettes are enchanting documentary scenes of daily survival that range from pavement vendors to the crammed transport trucks known as My Loves because of passengers’ involuntary embrace.
The artist explains how he learnt Psikhelekedana, popular “art made of wood”, at the age of 13 from a neighbour in Matola’s São Damaso district.
“The first time I fell in love was when I saw his knife drawing on wood,” he says.
They use sustainable mafurreira whitewood roots. “When it’s fresh, it’s soft; then it gets very hard when it dries. We just remove the secondary roots, so it can grow.”
His subjects evolved, from soccer games to the Coca-Cola factory. His 52-piece history series with four other artists in 2003, donated to the National Art Museum, ranges from Vasco da Gama’s 1498 arrival in Mozambique to peace talks.
Jethá’s new work on the São José Paquete d’Africa shipwreck, its 512 pieces representing every Mozambican slave on board, is in the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC.
One recurrent scene is of refugees moving nightly to find a safe place to sleep, as he did during the civil war.
As Ngwenya says, Jethá and his collective “illustrate and mirror what we are”. /© Times 2017