Gonçalo Mabunda Mozambique, 1975

Gonçalo Mabunda (b. 1 January 1975, Maputo, Mozambique) was born in the year of his country's independence and grew up during the civil war that devastated Mozambique from 1976 to 1992, losing relatives to the conflict. Educated in Maputo, he began painting at seventeen and by twenty-two was working as a full-time artist. His path found its definitive direction in 1995 within the project "Transforming Guns into Hopes", launched by the Christian Council of Mozambique after the Rome peace agreements: weapons collected from individuals and communities across the country, some 800,000 to date, are destroyed or deactivated, and some are entrusted to artists to be transformed into art. The project takes its name from the biblical verse of Micah, in which swords are hammered into ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks.

From AK-47s, rocket launchers, pistols and shell casings Mabunda builds thrones, masks and anthropomorphic figures. The thrones, his most celebrated works, are imposing and majestic, and precisely for this reason ironic: symbols of a power that rests on weapons, they denounce the emptiness of authority conquered through violence, while rifles become backrests, bombs become feet and bullets become decoration. The masks reinvent the sub-Saharan ritual tradition through an assemblage of striking modernist invention, compared to the imagery of Braque and Picasso. His works never conceal the violent history of their materials: they convert it, turning death literally into life and honouring the resilience and creativity of African civilian societies. In 2002 his "Throne of Peace" was presented to Pope John Paul II, an emblem of Mozambique's will to say no to war.

Mabunda took part in "Africa Remix" (Museum Kunst Palast, Düsseldorf; Hayward Gallery, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2004-2007) and in "Making Africa" (Vitra Design Museum and CCCB, Barcelona). He was selected by Okwui Enwezor for "All the World's Futures" at the 56th Venice Biennale (2015) and represented Mozambique in the National Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale (2019). His work has been shown at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, the Gangwon International Biennale, South Korea, the Johannesburg Art Gallery, the Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam, the Guggenheim Bilbao (2016), Palazzo Reale, Milan (2016), the Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2018), the European Parliament, Brussels (2017), and the Louvre Abu Dhabi ("Kings and Queens of Africa", 2025), as well as in the army museums of Norway, the Netherlands and Sweden. In Italy his work was the inaugural focus of the exhibition cycle "Ex Africa Semper Aliquid Novi", curated by Antonella Pisilli at Kyo Noir Studio, Viterbo (2016), a dialogue that continues at Black Liquid Art Gallery, Rome, with "After the Fire" (2026). In 2021 six of his totems entered the permanent collection of the American Embassy in Maputo. A partner artist of African Artists for Development, featured in André Magnin's "African Stories" (2014), his work has been covered by Le Monde and HuffPost. He lives and works in Maputo.