Contemporary Art in Mozambique

In colonial Lourenço Marques, one cultural association opened its doors to a shepherd, a domestic servant and a tennis club ball boy, and gave each of them a way into an artistic life. Nearly a century later, Mozambican artists are still answering the questions it first posed (...)

Founded in 1921 and settled since 1936 in the building it still occupies in central Maputo, Núcleo de Arte was, for most of the twentieth century, the closest thing Mozambique had to an art school. Billed in its own time as "the embassy of the arts," it was the first association in the territory to bring painting, sculpture, ceramics and photography together under one roof, open in principle to anyone who walked through its door — a rare condition in a colonial society organised, in every other respect, to keep people apart.

That openness shaped the artists who found it. Valente Malangatana Ngwenya (1936–2011) arrived at Núcleo de Arte in 1958 as a young man supporting himself as a ball boy at a Maputo tennis club, and left it, within a few years, as the country's most celebrated painter — jailed for eighteen months by the Portuguese secret police in 1964 for his ties to the independence movement, and decades later named UNESCO Artist for Peace for a body of work in which human, animal and plant life move through the same visionary, crowded field. Alberto Chissano found his way to the same building by a different route, taking a job there as a cleaner after years as a domestic servant and mineworker; watching the artists around him, he picked up a chisel for the first time at 29 and held his first solo exhibition in 1964. Ernesto Shikhani, a former shepherd from the Muvesha region, studied sculpture there too, under the Portuguese sculptor Lobo Fernandes, before a Gulbenkian Foundation scholarship took him to Europe in 1973. Three very different starting points, converging, within a few years of each other, on the same door.

Independence in 1975 changed the terms of the conversation without ending it. Estevão Mucavele, who had left Mozambique as a teenager to work first in South Africa's mines and later as a gallery cleaner and janitor in Johannesburg and Cape Town — teaching himself to paint, by his own account, largely to fill the free hours the job allowed him — returned home the year after independence and contributed to the mural at Maputo's Heroes' Square, part of a generation using painting to help write a new nation's visual language from scratch.

The sixteen-year civil war that followed independence left a different kind of material behind: hundreds of thousands of weapons, buried and hidden across the country long after the fighting ended. Since 1995, a Mozambican disarmament programme has exchanged tools and building materials for the guns communities still held, recovering more than 800,000 of them. Gonçalo Mabunda, working from a Maputo workshop since the late 1990s, is the best known of the artists who took some of those decommissioned AK-47s, land mines and pieces of military hardware and welded them into thrones, masks and figures — objects that are, by his own description, a way of representing each person who died by that same material, and of ensuring the weapons themselves can never be used again.

Reinata Sadimba pushed at a different boundary. Trained as a child in the Makonde tradition of utilitarian clay-making — a skill her community, like most in the region, treated as women's work, while sculpture proper was reserved for men — she began, in 1975, to bend that inherited craft toward something no one around her was doing: ceramic figures of a surreal, sometimes unsettling invention that owed nothing to utility. It took the international recognition that followed, now including the National Museum of Mozambique and Lisbon's Ethnographic Museum among the institutions holding her work, to settle the argument about whose work counted as sculpture.

Mário Macilau, born in Maputo in 1984 during the last and most violent years of the civil war, represents a still more recent turn — from the brush and the welding torch to the camera. He began washing cars and carrying groceries in a Maputo market at the age of ten; by 2007 he was a full-time photographer, and his long-term documentary projects on post-conflict life and the relationship between people and their surroundings continue, in a new medium, the same instinct toward testimony that runs through Mucavele's mural and Mabunda's thrones.

What connects a shepherd-turned-sculptor in the 1960s to a market boy-turned-photographer working today is not a shared style — Mozambican art has never settled into one — but a recurring pattern: artists arriving at their materials, whatever they happen to have at hand, from a position of hardship, and turning them toward testimony rather than decoration.

AFRICAN|CONTEMPORARY represents a number of the artists central to this story, including Malangatana, Alberto Chissano, Ernesto Shikhani, Estevão Mucavele, Gonçalo Mabunda, Reinata Sadimba and Mário Macilau, with original works available to view, discover and acquire directly from the gallery.