Who is Ibrahim Mahama?

The Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama, famous for his work using jute sacks as a central element, has won the XXIII Premio Pino Pascali. Ibrahim Mahama’s work will be on show at Polignano a Mare from 11 December 2021 to 13 March 2022.

Ghanaian Ibrahim Mahama (Tamale, 1987) is the winner of the XXIII Premio Pino Pascali, awarded annually by the Fondazione Pino Pascali. 

Born in 1987 in Tamale, a regional capital in northern Ghana with a population of half a million, where he currently lives and works, Mahama was also recently awarded the Prince Claus Award 2020 in Amsterdam, a prize that rewards those who have distinguished themselves most in the application of culture to social development. 

During his time at the university, he launched a series of interventions and activities reflecting on the theme of globalisation, work and the movement of goods, with works produced in part through collaborations with Ghanaian citizens. In 2019 the artist opened the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art (SCCA), a museum space run by a group of artists and curators active in Ghana, followed by the opening of a large studio complex, Red Clay, in the nearby town of Janna Kpenn, in September 2020. Including exhibition spaces, research facilities and an artist residency centre, these two sites represent Mahama’s contribution to the development and expansion of the contemporary art scene in his country.

His work has been included in a number of international exhibitions, including NIRIN, 22nd Biennale of Sydney (2020); Tomorrow There Will Be More of Us, Stellenbosch Triennial (2020); Living Grains, Fondazione Giuliani, Rome (2019); Future Genealogies, Tales From The Equatorial Line, 6th Lubumbashi Biennale, Democratic Republic of Congo (2019); House of Ghosts, The Whitworth, The University of Manchester (2019); Labour of Many, Norval Foundation, Cape Town (2019); Documenta 14, Athens and Kassel (2017); An Age of Our Own Making, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen and Holbæk (2016); Fracture, Tel Aviv Art Museum, Israel (2016); Artist’s Rooms, K21, Düsseldorf (2015); Material Effects, The Broad Art Museum, Michigan (2015). In addition, Mahama has participated in two editions of the Venice Biennale: in 2019, May You Live in Interesting Times, at the inaugural pavilion of Ghana, and in 2015, All the World’s Future, during which he presented the large installation Out of Bounds, made from jute bags, at the Tronchetto of the Arsenale.

Mahama’s artistic practice takes the jute sack, a recurring object in his work, as a symbol and metaphor for a fragile economy based on cocoa production: stamped, torn, patched, for Mahama it becomes an amplifier of stories, telling of the people who worked on it, in ports, warehouses, markets and cities.

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Bags become a stratification of memories, people, objects, places and architecture, and the reference is to the problems of the African continent, its migratory processes and the complex dynamics of globalisation. Produced in South-East Asia, the bags were imported by the Ghana Cocoa Boards to transport cocoa beans, which were considered a luxury product. Following this initial use, the bags were used on numerous occasions to transport products such as rice, millet, maize and coal. At the end of their working lives, Mahama bought them and sewed them to create huge tapestries, which he also used to conceal monumental buildings emblematic of consumer society, as in some well-known recent installations, also in Italy.

To bring textile design to London and drape it over the Barbican’s post-World War II brutalist forms was a feat of which Mahama is proud.

‘I thought there was nothing more beautiful than to create a relationship between these two forms of work, one post-war and one 21st century, but also steeped in the traditions and history of the pre-colonial era.

Today, it’s an extraordinary sight, especially when a blue sky brings out the pink.

Mahama has always been fascinated by the undulating shapes that the batakari take on when their wearers dance, and claims that they create a kind of optical effect.

It looks to me as if, when the wind blows a certain way, the purple hibiscus does its own dance.

Ms Dale is a freelance journalist, podcaster and documentary maker based in London.

The Barbican is showing Purple Hibiscus until 18 August, as part of the exhibition Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles In Art, which is open until 26 May.