Ibrahim Mahama

Mahama came to prominence for politically charged open-air installations using jute sacks, which are stitched together as a tattered patchwork and draped over architectural structures. Crisis and redemption are impetus to the work of Ibrahim Mahama. Vast in scale and ambition, his interventions in public space open a dialogue with histories of failure and hope. From conception to the acquisition and production of materials, through to installation, he refers to the process as ‘time travel’, rerouting the residues of colonial and postcolonial utopias to create new opportunities. “I’m interested in the point where the relationship between the material and society, or the space it finds itself in, breaks down,” he says.

Ibrahim Mahama was born in 1987 in Tamale, Ghana. He lives and works in Accra, Kumasi and Tamale. Solo exhibitions include Kunsthalle Osnabrück, Germany (2023); Oude Kerk, Amsterdam (2022); Frac Pays de la Loire (2022); The High Line, New York (2021); University of Michigan Museum of Art (2020); The Whitworth, University of Manchester (2019); Norval Foundation, Cape Town (2019); Tel Aviv Art Museum, Israel (2016); and K.N.U.S.T Museum, Kumasi, Ghana (2013). He has participated in numerous group exhibitions including Sharjah Biennial 15 (2023); 18th International Venice Architecture Biennale (2023); the 35th Bienal de São Paulo (2023); Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2021); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2020); 22nd Biennale of Sydney (2020); Stellenbosch Triennale (2020); 6th Lubumbashi Biennale, Democratic Republic of the Congo (2019); Ghana Pavilion, 58th Venice Biennale (2019); Documenta 14, Athens and Kassel (2017); Broad Art Museum, Michigan State University (2016); Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen and Holbæk (2016); 56th Venice Biennale (2015); and Artist’s Rooms, K21, Düsseldorf (2015). Mahama was also appointed Artistic Director of the 35th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts, Ljubljana (2023).

Untitled.Jute sacks.Variable dimensions.2013-2025
Mahama produces the large draping surfaces by carefully assembling sacks imported by the Ghana Cocoa Board and repurposed by charcoal sellers. The sacks present patches, markings and traces of traders’ names and locations on their rough brown skin, which map out the many transits they endure as vessels of commodities. The artist occasionally decorates them with the insertion of mass-produced Chinese–African print patchwork adding yet another layer of interpretation of the global movement of goods. The fact that fabric constitutes a marker of identity as well as a sign of particular occasions in the African context turns these insertions into a kind of portraiture of the wearers. Wrapped around heaps of merchandise in the market place or embracing the contours of a museum building, the spreads of jute fibres become an oversized socio political inquiry of the origin of materials, referencing what is normally hidden for the sake of concept or form. Ibrahim Mahama denudes the transits and ownerships of jute sacks along their lives as porters of goods, rendering visible the mechanisms of trade which define the world’s economy.
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