Abu Bakarr Mansaray was born in 1969 in Tongo (or Tongoma) in eastern Sierra Leone.
He moved to his uncle's house in Freetown, the capital, in 1987.
It was in a country on the brink of a civil war that Mansaray decided to become an artist. With an extraordinary will to learn, he revisited a technique common in West Africa—crafting decorative objects or toys from wire—to create improbable futuristic machines. “I am an artist who creates without setting any limits. I do drawing, painting, sculpture… I also invent machines for my personal use, and sometimes for others.”
While developing systems and machinery, he studied on his own from manuals on chemistry, physics, electronics, and mathematics, and successively proclaimed himself “Professor,” then “The Master,” “The Master and Magnificent,” and finally “Professor Abu The Magnificent.” “My official name is Abu-Bockari Mansaray, but most people call me Abu Bakarr Mansaray, which means ‘the master,’ referring to my extraordinary skills. I create unique and futuristic sculptures using machines I built myself, which make these sculptures dynamic—they can produce fire, sound, smoke, move, explode, or even create cold.”
Elusive and traumatized by civil war, Mansaray is fascinated by science fiction and considers himself the only human capable of seeing and understanding the extraterrestrials living among us who wish to destroy humanity. He now works exclusively on extraordinary pencil and colored pencil drawings—schematics with calculations and notes that depict intricate mechanisms sketching incredible futuristic machines.
There is no doubt that the political, economic, and social situation in Sierra Leone, a country scarred by war, shaped the artist’s imagination. In 1998, he narrowly escaped to the Netherlands, but his work remains a testament to the atrocities of that war.
The titles of his works—Digital Man (2004), Sinister Project (2006), The Aliens Most Sophisticated Nuclear Hammer SUV (2010), Sophisticated Hell Lizard (2011), and Terrific, Poisonous and Hostile (2011)—evoke images of destruction and death, reminiscent of B-movie science fiction or horror films. In The Aliens Ultimate. Bad Ass. (2016), the artist depicts the arrival of aliens and their desire to annihilate humanity. A terrifying spacecraft with complex machinery delivers extraterrestrial executioners to Earth, massacring helpless humans with rifles and sickles. Mansaray sees himself as an interpreter of these alien beings, carriers of “superhuman” intelligence, and presents himself as the only one capable of averting the foretold catastrophe: “Pray not to witness this calamity. See me for the solution.”
“I love creating strange and complex drawings, building intricate machines inspired by scientific ideas that sometimes go beyond what humans can imagine. I want people to feel the power of creation.”
