The history of 20th century art looked like a perfect sample of linearity and centralization; in large cultural capitals of the world Paris and New York a number of closely related artists created the foundations of Modernism, and then – Postmodernism. Cubism, for instance, was born from a playful correspondence between Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque; and it irreversibly changed the attitudes to space in the art.

Changes went on in the 21st century, when the demand for decolonization and decentralization was growing in the art communities. It became clear that Modernism happened in many respects due to the visual and conceptual solutions that European artists appropriated from the African tribes. Unrepresentative emotional expression, sharp broken lines, aggressive strokes, naivety, and rhythm of the colors – all these things would have never touched the canvases of Modigliani, Matisse, Gauguin, Klee and dozens of other modernist artists, if there was no colonization of Mozambique, Côte d'Ivoir, Guinea and the African continent as a whole. Partly for this reason a great theorist of decolonial art and curator Okwui Enwezor included Gonçalo Mabunda's sculptures in the main exhibition of All The World's Futures within the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015.

Today, the modern artists from diverse and emerging Africa claim that it was their legacy that gave the start to Contemporary art in the West. More and more private and public collections acquire the artworks by African artists; and museums are forced to integrate African identity into the existing chronology of their archives.

The young artist Aboudia started his career at the age of 16 as a street artist in the city of Abidjan, the capital of Côte d'Ivoire. His portraits were inspired by the forms of the Dan tribe masks; these are the embossed face features, round shapes of the lips and cheekbones, symmetrical hairstyle, indicating the status of the owner of the mask. It is important to remember that in African tradition the masks fulfilled a specific function and were used in rituals. Only after the masks were exhibited in the western institutions, the sharp boarderline appeared between the object (the one being observed) and the subject (the one who is observing).

Gonçalo Mabunda is also interested in exploring the transition of African tradition into the visual vocabulary of contemporary world. Together with UN missionaries who work on Mozambique's demilitarization program after the bloody and senseless civil war, the artist redefines the role of the tradition in the modern world. On a formal level it is all the same thrones and masks that the tribes of Tsonga, Makua, and Makonde created for hundreds of years. However, for his artworks Mabunda uses disassembled AK-47 submachine guns, bullets from Israel, U.S.-imported torpedoes, as well as other war artifacts. The things that were recently the tools of destruction and devastation now enter the dimention of art, where the same things are used for the sake of creation.