Abu-Bakarr Mansaray (often known as Abu Mansaray) is an artist from Sierra Leone whose practice emerged in a country on the brink of—and later deeply affected by—civil war. His early decision to become an artist was shaped by this unstable context, as well as by a strong autodidactic drive to understand and reimagine the world through making.
Drawing on a West African tradition of crafting small decorative objects and toys from wire, he began by constructing improbable, futuristic machines. Over time, he expanded this practice into a hybrid artistic language combining drawing, sculpture, and imagined engineering systems. He describes himself as an artist without limits: “I do drawing, painting, sculpture… I also invent machines for my personal use, and sometimes for others.”
Self-taught, Mansaray studied manuals in chemistry, physics, electronics, and mathematics, building his own conceptual universe through technical diagrams and speculative thinking. He successively adopted self-proclaimed titles—“Professor,” “The Master,” “The Master and Magnificent,” and ultimately “Professor Abu The Magnificent”—which reflect both his performative identity and his belief in his own visionary role. His works often include claims of machines capable of producing fire, smoke, movement, sound, or even explosions and cold, blurring the line between invention, fiction, and belief.
Marked by the trauma of war, Mansaray’s imagination is strongly influenced by science fiction and apocalyptic narratives. He presents himself as uniquely able to perceive extraterrestrial beings living among humans and interprets his work as a form of communication with these entities. In 1998, he narrowly escaped to the Netherlands, but his artistic universe remains anchored in the violence and instability of Sierra Leone’s recent history.
His drawings—often dense technical schematics filled with calculations, annotations, and hybrid machine designs—depict a world of catastrophic technologies and alien invasions. Works such as Digital Man (2004), Sinister Project (2006), and The Aliens Ultimate. Bad Ass. (2016) evoke destruction through a visual language reminiscent of science fiction and horror aesthetics. Across these narratives, Mansaray positions himself as both witness and mediator of a larger cosmic drama, claiming to offer insight—and even solutions—to an impending catastrophe he alone can interpret.
