By appropriating and reinterpreting discarded objects, artist Ibrahim Mahama has been able to share new perspectives on Ghana’s complex history while actively contributing to its vibrant present and future. His works often involve collaboration with local communities, using leftover materials from Western-driven “development” as symbols of cultural identity and societal memories. In doing so, he sheds light on the impact of the global economic exchange on people’s lives and challenges the norms of the commodity system.
Originally from Ghana, Mahama is probably one of the most well-known contemporary African artists working today. He has participated in multiple Biennales and exhibitions globally while actively advocating for the empowerment of his community centers, first with the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art (SCCA) and then with Red Clay Studio in Tamale, Ghana. This year alone, his achievements include transforming the exterior of London’s Barbican Art Centre with Purple Hibiscus, creating a significant landscape installation for the inaugural edition of the Malta Biennale, mounting his first solo show in Scotland at Fruitmarket gallery and receiving the inaugural Sam Gilliam Award from the Dia Art Foundation.
This September, Mahama debuts at the new White Cube Gallery on the Upper East Side—the artist’s first solo show in New York and first presentation in the city since the 57 Forms of Liberty, which was installed at the High Line in 2021. Ahead of the opening of “A SPELL OF GOOD THINGS,” Observer met with the artist to discuss what we can expect from this ambitious exhibition, the role of artists in complex times and the artist’s relentless commitment to the development of his local community.
As with other recent projects, the new body of works presented in New York partially departs from the imposing installations of jute sacks that you’re best known for. Most of the work in the new show originates from items salvaged from the former Gold Coast railway system, displayed alongside effects from the Tamale Teaching Hospital in Northern Ghana. I’m curious how you yourself read this new body of works. Can you step outside them briefly and help us understand what we can see in the show?
In Ghana, in the early 20th Century, the British built the railway, like many places in the Global South, with the primary purpose being for colonial extraction of timber, gold, bauxite and manganese, among other resources. Most importantly, Ghana was the highest producer of cocoa in the world in the early 20th Century, and railings were also built to stop contamination during transportation. Choosing to interact with those materials, I was interested in the labor factor and the forced movement of people to allow all this to happen. It was for those people and the commodities that were produced that the Industrial Revolution could later take place. The idea of industrializing materials created more than wealth in Europe, and I’ve been following this trajectory.
I thought the railways in Ghana were somehow embedded with all these histories. Also in the early 20th Century, modern art museums were being built around the world, especially in New York. Those high-rise buildings were built with the same materials as those railways, so the materials I’m buying and repurposing cross paths with other histories. Among the installations in New York, one of the most important ones uses hospital beds. The leather on the beds comes from the floor of the old carriages used in Ghana in the ’80s and ’90s during the structural adjustment program when they started to be used for passengers. I bought them; they were abandoned together, like many of the rail materials. The idea was also to transfer them from the south of the Gold Coast to the north of Ghana using the same route that the labor came from, but I realized that the underside of the leather was interesting because the train had been abandoned. It was decaying. And then when you peeled it off, it almost looked like a skin, with all those wounds. The beds themselves could, in this way, embody the crises of the health system in Ghana and elsewhere, such as in the United States. Combining these elements from this abandoned railway system created an aesthetic form to generate a specific political discussion.
You’re interested in how “crisis and failure are absorbed into materials,” and indeed, all the objects extend their objective materiality to the dynamics of colonial powers and exploitative trading systems they served in their previous lives. Complex layering of history and loss make your works powerful witnesses to the human drama of colonial trade, as well as the subsequent infrastructural bankruptcy, mechanical breakdown and “all the things that were destroyed in the post-Independence era.” When you were sourcing these objects, did you face resistance, given that they were so political?
You always find resistance to the type of work I do. I’m interested in failure as material but also as potential: the idea that failure opens up a portal for us to reread the world that we live in because when something no longer works, it calls for us to pause in time and reconsider the way forward closely. I’m looking at failure as a means to open up a new kind of potential that will lead us into a new kind of discussion and a new kind of promise.
I bought these from scrap dealers, and I’m interested in the power of contemporary art to bring them back to life in a very different form. I would buy the trains, and I would reactivate them by taking elements from them, like the floor. I used the wood to make sculptures or metal to make certain types of paintings. Then, I would repair the body of the train to transform it into a classroom, a music recording space, a living space or something like that. I’m exploring how we can intervene within these objects without forgetting that these objects are still embodied with significant memories and histories, and each time that we engage with them in this timeline, we’re engaging with a different timeline. I’m really interested in how the work can allow another generation to connect with histories and esthetics across a different timeline.
Art-making for you has always been animated by your focus on collective empowerment, encouraging Ghanaian people to work on these artworks with you to explore new creative dimensions of their existence. What was it like working with local collaborators at Red Clay Studio, who helped you repurpose materials, converting the carriages into classrooms, libraries and studio spaces while transforming other parts into sculptures?
For me, working in the community is very important because it’s also about that intellectual labor that is somehow embedded within the materials we’re collecting. I believe art has always been born out of crisis. When we make art, we have to realize that an artist has a responsibility. Artists do not think the same way that other people do because most people in the world just want to survive, live, take care of their families and so on. Artists want more. We want to be able to reflect. We ask questions that normally people would not ask.
By working with the community, you help people reflect more. I think it’s not just the change in ideology but also a shift in consciousness in how young people view the world. And when you’re working within a community like in Africa where about 70 percent of the population is very young, you’ve to ask yourself about the future of the work. These people I’m working with are then going to become adults, and when they have children, their children will inherit the legacy of the ideas and the work we’re doing.
Various internationally renowned artists from Africa or its diaspora have similarly decided to open artist spaces in their own countries, aiming to foster and promote further development of contemporary art scenes. I’m thinking of Elias Sime, Kehinde Wiley, Yinka Shonibare, Attakwi Clottey and Amoako Boafo. How do you believe these initiatives represent a starting point for encouraging a different redistribution of resources and power beyond the art world and toward the continent?
I believe that the purpose of building contemporary art institutions, particularly studios, is to encourage more people to be artistically sensitive. It means asking questions about ethics, about tomorrow, morality, responsibility… all these things need to come into play, regardless of what background they are coming from. It’s about respect towards nature and respect toward one another and things like that—that is what we aim for. When artists create communities, those communities are filled with love.
When you’re building a space, as I did with Red Clay and Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art, it’s not just about the space; it’s also about how active the space is and how people within the local community become active participants. Otherwise, those spaces fall back into the global contemporary art capitalist structure, where artists are supposed to come and do residencies and produce objects disconnected from local communities. I think it’s essential that we create spaces in local communities and contexts where we understand that local intelligence is paramount to making decisions regarding establishing these institutions. We know we are getting somewhere in the world if it helps transform consciousnesses within those spaces.
I believe that arts can be a starting point for people in the local community to become active agents, influencing them and changing societal power relations. I think that contemporary art, in particular, can open up a portal in space and time, allowing people to travel back into traditional practices, beliefs and related things. Often, contemporary attempts to take this force to a new level of sophistication instead alienate entire audiences. In our spaces, I like to have people coming from outside the arts so that they can do things.
Ibrahim Mahama’s “A SPELL OF GOOD THINGS“ is on view at White Cube in New York through October 26.
