The artist Ibrahim Mahama keeps on the lookout for scrap — major scrap — that bears the marks and summons memories of the labor that built Ghana, his country.
When the discards are smallish — for instance square mesh grids used for smoking fish, or wood boxes in which shoeshine men carry their brushes — Mahama will buy them by the dozens or hundreds and stash them until the right artistic application appears.
When they’re massive — like colonial-era rail carriages or, on one occasion, six derelict Soviet-made passenger airplanes — he has them hauled by flatbed trucks to Tamale, his home city in northern Ghana. They join the collections that he has amassed in three warehouse-scaled complexes that he has converted into studio, exhibition and education spaces.
Mahama, 37, earned notice with large-scale assemblages of jute sacks, stitched together by hand, that once carried cocoa — Ghana’s top export — and then coal or other goods. They accumulated aromas and physical wear. (The artist had observed the simple paradox that trucks carrying jute sacks of goods for export easily travel across borders that many workers cannot.)
With this history-charged fabric he cloaked whole buildings, à la Christo, from the National Theater in Accra, Ghana’s capital, to a pair of 19th-century towers in Kassel, Germany, during Documenta in 2017. Two years earlier, as the youngest artist in the 2015 Venice Biennale, he had used the sacks to drape the long passageway where visitors exit the Arsenale, the dockyards exhibition space.
“With most of the materials I work with, it’s not as if I’m a genius and I just came up with it,” Mahama said. “There are things that you encounter all the time, and one day there’s a moment when you think, if this thing and that thing come together; this new form might be made. The labor of many people has already gone into it. As an artist, you’re just borrowing from that and recontextualizing.”
In New York, Mahama’s public art has appeared at Rockefeller Center in 2019, where he replaced United Nations member flags with jute banners, and on the High Line in 2021, where he installed an inverted industrial tank, scavenged in Wilmington, N.C.
He is now presenting new work at White Cube gallery, on Madison Ave. in Manhattan. It includes a large installation involving salvaged hospital beds and upholstery from old rail cars, as well as charcoal and photomontage works on paper, representing his less-known drawing practice. (Our interview began over Zoom to Ghana and continued in person recently at the gallery.)
Mahama makes a lot of things work at once. His installations are intensely material, yet composed with a draughtsman’s precision and a painter’s instinct. He employs repetition — for instance, dozens of wooden school-desks, each mounted with an old sewing machine. But he also uses juxtaposition and layers, inserting facsimiles of old accounting ledgers, tax receipts or geological survey maps into his sculptural assemblages or as underlays in his drawings.
And remarkably, he has achieved blue-chip status and ubiquity on the biennial and Kunsthalle circuit while firmly based in Tamale, in Ghana’s historically neglected north, with no previous art infrastructure. There, he uses his earnings not only to pay the many assistants and local craftspeople who contribute to his projects, but to build and run whole new cultural institutions. Tamale has become a niche destination, particularly for Global South artists and curators who are keen to study his community-oriented model.
“The idea is to reverse the capital,” he said of the flow of resources. For decades, under both colonial and independent rule, regions like northern Ghana underwent extraction of all kinds, from commodities for export to the work of migrant laborers who built infrastructure and industry in the more prosperous south. Mahama’s aim is to restore some of that value. The proposition is in part economic, moving money from the art world into local hands. But it’s also conceptual, built on the idea that the material discards from failed or exhausted development models can trigger the imagination in completely new ways.
The art “that you produce from materials that are embedded with history,” he said, generates capital to “create new forms of institutions in such a way that you’re inviting school kids or people from the community to be part of the making of things.”
African art leaders have noticed. “Ibrahim’s work is important because it is communal and generative,” said Koyo Kouoh, the director of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town. She added that he has forged a distinctive way to connect the “critical reading of history” with community-oriented art-making. Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, director of the House of World Cultures in Berlin, called Mahama “one of the world’s greatest archivists” who is at the same time ambitiously focused on creating institutions for the future. “This brother wants to go far,” Ndikung said of Mahama. “His time-scale is 1,000 years.”
Both Mahama’s current exhibition in New York and the installation at its heart are titled “A Spell of Good Things.” (He borrowed the name from a recent novel by the Nigerian writer Ayobami Adebayo.) He imagined the installation after discovering, at a scrapyard in Tamale, a trove of discarded hospital beds. Some were intact or with equipment still attached, others rusted or partly dismantled.
He has used medical equipment before; at the Sharjah Biennial in 2023, he showed an installation of old commode wheelchairs lined up in rows. The beds, he said, reminded him of bodies. “Some can move, some can’t move. Some are missing legs. I almost interpreted them as if they were bodies which have been stripped to their basic essence, which is just the spine.”
Typically, he said, dealers resell some of these beds and break others down for junk. He bought them up instead to make art — in his view, an equally legitimate application, because it allows one to reimagine their past context as new forms. “When objects accumulate memory and provenance you need to be able to sense that in order to create a certain kind of dialogue,” he said.
Stretched across the discarded beds is a faux-leather fabric recovered from his old rail cars. It is marked in block letters with names — Zenabu, Saadia, Tufeku — typical of the region. The ink was produced from carbon residue of kerosene lanterns mixed with herbs; three Fulani women in his studio applied the markings using broom bristles.
Mahama grew up in a large polygamous family from the north that had branches in Accra, where he spent his childhood, attending strict Catholic schools. His grandfather in Accra lived in a car repair shop, he said, while his father in Tamale was a road contractor — perhaps the early sparks, Mahama speculated, of his interest in aging machinery.
But his methods crystallized in Kumasi, Ghana’s second-largest city, at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, which houses Ghana’s most important art faculty. There, for some 20 years, what has been described as a “silent revolution in art education” has taken shape, led by its current dean, the professor kąrî’kạchä seid’ou — that’s the spelling, with the lowercase and diacritical marks indicating seid’ou’s refusal of westernized norm and insistence on the freedom to self-name.
A radically experimental program that now draws students from across Africa and even the United States, the Kumasi school has produced a vast network of innovative artists, academics and curators known as blaxTARLINES, of whom Mahama is the most internationally famous.
The program’s approach is aggressively anti-commercial. “Art is not necessarily what we know but it’s what is yet to become,” Mahama said, describing the ethos. “Once there’s an idea, then you’ll find the mediums or materials that are right for it.” A principal concern imparted by seid’ou, he added, is “how we can translate art from a state of commodity into a gift” — a mission that Mahama enacts by building “using the residue of capital throughout the art world.”
Mahama also credits art school for refining his technique — initially in painting — and exposing him to touchstone artists: He cited Robert Rauschenberg’s use of materials and assemblage, Robert Smithson’s work in land and marginal settings, and in Africa, Romuald Hazoumé and El Anatsui, pioneers of rigorous art made from salvaged and reanimated ordinary objects.
Today, however, it is Mahama who is setting the pace. “Ibrahim is a special risk taker,” said seid’ou, his mentor, by phone from Kumasi. “His work doesn’t end with just the visual or the spectacle. It’s always connected to things that are happening in Ghana and other places, changing conditions of art practice, conditions of life.”
At home, in Tamale, Mahama, who was recently married, said, “I’m always thinking, how do we make this more accessible? Here’s a community that we haven’t engaged, where none of the kids have come to the studio, can we get a bus to go and bring them?”
He is now planning more buildings, more experiments. “I think it’s a lifetime’s work,” he said. “It’s a burden that was bestowed on me that I can’t do away with.”
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