David Aguacheiro is a Mozambican filmmaker, multidisciplinary artist, photographer and graphic designer.
2023 Biennial Year Find out more
He has an MA in Design and Multimedia, and participated in study exchanges at the Icelandic Academy of the Arts – Reykjavik, and the Art Academy – Oslo.
He has participated in several national and international biennales & exhibitions, amongst which La Biennale de Venezia 2022 – “African Identities” (Akka Project), “Being and Becoming” !Kauru Contemporary Art from Africa 2016 (Pretoria), his solo exhibition “Take Away” at CCFM (2018, Maputo), SLOW Art “Social Life of Waste” – a multidisciplinary collaboration & research residency between South Africa, Zimbabwe and Mozambique (2016-2017), and Catchupa Factory – photography residency in Mindelo, Cape Verde (2019).
His documentary films, photography and paintings have won international recognition & awards, such as a Honorable Mention from the National Art Museum of Mozambique (2016).
He works with photography, painting, videoart, metal, and installations. The themes that interest him most are the environment, human rights, and identity, using his work to provoke the viewers – provocation as a means to get people questioning and thinking for themselves.
He is the co-founder and creative director of Aguacheiro Design & Multimedia since 2013, a founding member of the first Mozambican videoart association Video Arte, Mozambique, and the director and co-founder of emptyroom.art, an art & residency space in Maputo since 2019. He was a lecturer in Film and Audiovisual Media at the Superior Institute for Arts and Culture Maputo between 2015-2020.
Liverpool Biennial 2023
'Take Away' (2018)
This photographic installation highlights the ongoing extractivism (the removal of large quantities of raw or natural materials, particularly for export) of oil, sea life and essential natural resources from the artist’s home country of Mozambique.
Aguacheiro questions the value and ethics of consumer goods and trade, asking us to consider the devastating and long-term impact on the people and land which remain.
Confronting us with the uncomfortable truth, the portraits show people stripped of not only their resources, but their clothes, dignity and identities. The artist suggests that the extraction is much deeper than that of just the land, and that there is also an extraction of culture, place, tradition, language, religion, worth and self taking place.
Courtesy of the artist.
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David Aguacheiro, ‘Take Away’, 2018. Liverpool Biennial 2023 at Open Eye Gallery. Courtesy of Liverpool Biennial. Photography by Mark McNulty
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David Aguacheiro, ‘Take Away’, 2018. Liverpool Biennial 2023 at Open Eye Gallery. Courtesy of Liverpool Biennial. Photography by Stuart Whipps
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David Aguacheiro, ‘Take Away’, 2018. Liverpool Biennial 2023 at Open Eye Gallery. Courtesy of Liverpool Biennial. Photography by Stuart Whipps
