1986
National Museum of Art, Maputo, Mozambique
This 50th-birthday retrospective exhibition of Malangatana Valente Ngwenya (1936-2011, b Mozambique) opened at the National Museum of Art in Maputo in 1986, and for the next three years, selections from it toured the socialist world. With the sometimes active, sometimes tacit support of the Mozambican state apparatus, Malangatana took an active role in organizing the exhibition and its touring itinerary, crossing the porous boundaries between official artworlds in socialist states and his own international social networks.
The retrospective visited a number of capitalist as well as socialist states, thereby eliding divides imposed by economic, political, cultural and racialized ideologies.