Ibrahim Mahama is an artist who lives and works between Accra and Tamale, in Ghana. He studied painting and sculpture at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi.
He is known for his large-scale installations, sculptures and architectural interventions that explore themes of global trade, labour, migration, economic inequality and the legacies of colonialism. He often makes use of materials collected from urban environments – wood remnants, paper documents and jute sacks – which he manipulates and transforms. As he explains “I am interested in how crisis and failure are absorbed into this material, with a strong reference to the global transaction and the functioning of capitalist structures.”
The historical conditions of failure are used as archival materials towards renewed imagination and social transformation. Textiles and architecture hold a central place in Mahama’s work, which he describes as archival documents, marked with time, form and place. “The hope is that their residues – stained, broken and abandoned, but bearing light, might lead us into new possibilities and spaces beyond,” Mahama says. Crucial to his practice is the collaborative process by which he collects, remakes and installs his materials, involving artisans, architects, technicians, artists, traders, scaffolders, executives and bureaucrats, among others.
In 2019, Mahama opened the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art (SCCA) in Tamale, a museum space run by a group of artists and curators active in Ghana, followed by the opening of a vast studio complex, Red Clay, in nearby Janna Kpeŋŋ in September 2020. Comprising exhibition spaces, research facilities and an artist residency centre, both sites represent Mahama’s contribution to the development and expansion of the contemporary art scene in his country. In April 2021, Mahama opened a renovated silo, Nkrumah Volini, in Tamale. This is the third educational institution he has opened in northern Ghana in the past few years. His work has been shown in numerous significant shows and institutions worldwide.
Ghana