© WHITE CUBE OPPOSITE, (OLLIE HAMMICK). TOP: © IBRAHIM MAHAMA
M AT E R I A L WITNESS Ibrahim Mahama’s artwork carefully examines aspects of trade and labour in his native Ghana. The worn surfaces and historic inscriptions adorning his signature threadbare sacking – draped as mammoth installations or hung as wall sculptures – act as evidence of their ownership, transit and repurposing. Meanwhile, by exchanging United Nations flags for jute substitutes, he presents a sharp indictment of ongoing global inequality. Allie Biswas offers her verdict r
Opposite: Mahama often incorporates the metal authentication tags of the Ghana Cocoa Board and sections of hard-wearing textiles into his jute-sack ‘paintings’ such as Hamale Bisi (2017; detail). Top: for KNUST Museum (2013), which marked a pivotal moment in Mahama’s practice, the artist covered the library at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi – his alma mater – with a patchwork shroud
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TOP: © FROM IBRAHIM MAHAMA; © WHITE CUBE (BEN WESTOBY); COURTESY OF FONDAZIONE NICOLA TRUSSARDI (MARCO DE SCALZI); COURTESY OF THE HIGH LINE (TIMOTHY SCHENCK)
‘I NEEDED
something that was outside of the artist’s studio,’ explains Ibrahim Mahama, reflecting on the first public artwork he made almost a decade ago. Then nearing the final stages of his master’s degree, he conceived his Mallam Atta market project in 2012 as part of his thesis. It took the form of an expansive installation: a patchwork of jute sacks draped over the piles of coal waiting to be traded in one of Accra’s lively wholesale marketplaces, resulting in a large quilted mound. In making use of these sacks – found throughout Ghana – he sought to draw attention to the movement of commodities, and the labour that goes along with such exchanges. In the years since, the jute sack has become integral to the artist’s socially engaged practice, which continues to explore the life-cycles of goods. Mahama had initially explored the modest textile object during painting classes, encouraged by his mentor Karî’kachä Seid’ou, whose conceptual approach transformed the fine-art curriculum at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Kumasi. ‘He taught radical ideas that encouraged me to think about the history of these sacks,’ Mahama says, ‘and how they relate to the ways in which capital circulates.’ Initially purchased by the Ghana Cocoa Board for exporting their goods, the sacks are often repurposed by other traders for the transportation of charcoal or rice. ‘I became interested in this system and the aesthetics that come with it: when the material gets to a point where it can no longer be used to bag anything, due to overuse; when it has reached its moment of crisis.’ The threadbare sacks in Mahama’s works are not discarded, but sourced directly from the vendor, with Mahama offering brandnew sacks in return. Names of previous traders and points of transit are often inscribed onto the jute’s surface, forming a pattern of sorts that he likens to a painting, while the material’s scarred qualities remind him of ‘a tattoo on the body’. Such features are especially marked when looking at the artist’s wall-based sculptures, where several sacks have been configured in a rectangular arr ange ment, often combined with scrap metal, tarpaulin and other textiles. After the market installation, which began Mahama’s ‘Occupation’ series (2012-15), ‘everything was more or less an experiment’, he says. But his proposal to drape a property on the university’s campus (KNUST Museum, 2013) proved revelatory. ‘I realised there was quite a lot of potential there, and I started letting the history of these spaces inform me.’ Mahama’s jute-sack compositions have since infiltrated the public realm, occupying landmark buildings and prominent locations worldwide. Only a couple of years after graduating, he r From top: Mahama often works with local communities or ex-workers at his chosen sites, as in Beposo Bridge, Site of Production , 1934-2016 (2016); Zuhulana 1 (2015-16) utilises a well-worn prayer and sleeping mat; a detail from A Friend (2019), covering historic toll gates in Milan; 57 Forms of Liberty (2021) was commissioned by the High Line, New York’s elevated public park
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gate was constructed as the original entrance into the city during the Middle Ages, where you would pay your taxes; humans have always moved from one place to the other.’ That same year, he replaced the United Nations flags (192 in all) that surround Rockefeller Center’s famed skating rink with 50 jute flags handmade in Ghana, making a stand on prevailing inequalities. r
For Ex Africa , a major survey of African art at the Centro Cultural Banco de Brasil in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, in 2017, Mahama createdNon-Orientable Paradise Lost 1667 . Set in the gallery’s central atrium, it was one of a series of huge sculptures featuring ‘shoemaker boxes’ used by young Ghanaian workers. He engaged collaborators to produce hundreds of these boxes, which he crammed with objects obtained by negotiation and exchange
© IBRAHIM MAHAMA
participated in the 2015 Venice Biennale, where his cloth-covered intervention in the central exhibition spaces extended for 300m. In 2019, commissioned by Fon dazione Nicola Trussardi, he devised A Friend , camouflaging the two historic toll gates in Milan’s Porta Venezia with sheets of brown and yellow fabric squares. ‘The migrant crisis in Italy was at its peak,’ Mahama says. ‘The
Another object that has long preoccupied Mahama is the ‘shoemaker box’. Cobbled together from offcuts, these wooden receptacles hold tools for polishing and mending shoes, allowing young work ers in Accra or Kumasi to move around the city. Fascinated by ‘the character of the object and what it represents’, he started to collect these boxes, later taking them to a former paint-manufacturing factory in Tema to have reproductions made. Resembling miniature houses, they form the basis for the ‘Non-Orientable Nkansa’ series. In these mammoth sculptures, hundreds of boxes are compressed into a single unit, with shoe heels, hammers and needles visible at various junctures. Since 2014, he has collected archival materials, such as financial records and office files, from buildings that previously functioned as silos and factories in the period that immediately followed Ghana’s independence. Intended to boost the nation’s economy – an enterprise that ultimately proved unsuccessful – these sites have been abandoned for over half a century. In Exchange-Exchanger, 1957-2057(2015-16), Mahama brought his country’s past to the fore, draping 22 of these derelict buildings from around the country and recording the process through drones. ‘This was the first time I titled the work with consideration to the historical context of the buildings,’ he says, while the end date of 2057 defiantly looks ahead to future possibilities. As a testament to this optimism, Mahama set about acquiring and refurbishing abandoned silos in Tamale, introducing an artistic infrastructure in Ghana that was hitherto lacking. In 2019, he opened the artist-run project space Savannah Centre for Contem porary Art (SCCA), where he keeps a studio and hosts residency programmes. This was followed by Red Clay, a 200-acre complex that encompasses learning facilities for the community, including an art and design school and archaeological museum. A third centre, Nkrumah Volini, launched in April this year. During preliminary visits to the site, Mahama found a fully fledged ecosystem, ‘fish, frogs, a whole colony of bats’, which prompted the collages that frame his current show in London. In these paper and canvas compositions, photographic prints of wild life are superimposed on to archival documents and photos of factory life. Eliciting a relationship between industry and ecology, they also highlight the implications of such a pairing. ‘Through these centres, and in relation to my own practice, I am thinking about the future of art,’ he says. ‘It is all very interconnected’ $ ‘Ibrahim Mahama: Lazarus’ is at White Cube Bermondsey, 144-152 Bermond sey St, London SE1, 15 Sept-7 Nov. Ring 020 7930 5373, or visit whitecube.com. ‘57 Forms of Liberty’ is on view in New York until March 2022 (thehighline.org) From top: Mahama’s exhibition at White Cube features new collages based on the office files found at abandoned industrial sites; a charcoal sack printed with a birth certificate and melted sleeping mats combine in Produce X (2015-16, detail); a drone shot of Exchange-Exchanger, 1957-2057; a dizzying view of the installation Fracture, staged at Tel Aviv Museum of Art in 2016-17
ALL © IBRAHIM MAHAMA, EXCEPT ‘PRODUCE X’ © WHITE CUBE (GEORGE DARRELL).UNLESS OTHERWISE STATED, ALL IMAGES COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND WHITE CUBE
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