Zambian Artist Victor Kalinosi Mutale Announced as First ARAK Collection Artist in Residence

Zambian Artist Victor Kalinosi Mutale Announced as First ARAK Collection Artist in Residence

Doha, Qatar – August 2025 – The ARAK Collection is honoured to welcome Victor Kalinosi Mutale as the inaugural artist to participate in our newly established Artist in Residence programme.

Born in 1971 in Mungwe, Zambia, Mutale is a self-taught artist whose formative years were marked by a deep engagement with drawing and a growing awareness of the political and cultural shifts shaping Southern Africa. Influenced by Pan-Africanist ideals and a family legacy of liberation struggles, he initially considered a military path before redirecting his energy to art following South Africa’s democratic transition. Since 1995, Mutale has worked across drawing, sculpture, and collage, creating works that engage questions of identity, heritage, and historical memory.

Reflecting on his drawing practice, Mutale explains: “I did simple drawings in simple form so that when I am not there the viewer can tell the story by relating the drawing to the title. These are symbols I have not seen before. I was just applying my brain to create. Random images would pop up when I came up with the concept.”

This approach has earned significant critical acclaim. In Chronicles of the Road: Five Nations, Five Artists, art historian Barnabas Ticha Muvhuti observed that Mutale’s symbols allow him to address complex subjects “without having to reproduce figurations of the dehumanised subject, thereby making a clever intervention.” Writer Ashraf Jamal, in African Art: The ARAK Collection, notes that Mutale’s work offers “the rest and ease that comes when we stop making sense; when things, forms, colours, conspire to liberate us from ourselves, from culture and civilisation, from bondage.”

During his residency in Doha, Mutale will develop new work that continues his exploration of identity and historical memory.

The ARAK Collection looks forward to presenting the results of this residency and to deepening dialogue around contemporary African art in Qatar and beyond.

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