Volta New York 2022

Goncalo Mabunda’s works evoke the collective memory of his country Mozambique, which had lived through a devastating civil war, and the residual bric-a-brac of war are the found objects that he recycles as his medium of expression. He embarked on gathering shards of national memory in the form of discarded weapons fragments, piecing them together into sculptures. Out of that he forged a fantastical iconography derived from African fetish traditions rendered in rusting steel. He welds together menacing instruments of death, bullets, pistols, parts of Kalashnikovs, into disarming objects, deceptively esthetic, fused to suggest a multiplicity of meanings, not least to suggest alternate uses, and indeed alternate visions of how his culture might have otherwise employed itself with ambient materials. By giving anthropomorphic forms to the objects, he not only ironically comments on the absurdity of violence that had divided his country for a long period, but also positively reflects on the resilience of African civilians through the transformative power of art. 

JEFFREY HARGRAVE