Ibrahim Mahama Considers Ghana’s Future by Revisiting Its Industrial Past Inside Fondation Cartier
With “The Harvest Season,” the artist brings together nine other talents to explore his home country’s colonial and postcolonial histories and cultural aspirations
Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama thinks big, very big. So the interiors of the Fondation Cartier, which opened in its new home in Paris this time last year, are the perfect place to see his work. Here in the cavernous spaces excavated by architect Jean Nouvel from a former department store, almost opposite the Louvre, Mahama’s huge works made of jute sacks line the walls, and his hangings, patchworked of old textiles, tar-infused materials, and metal pans crushed into circles, drop 15 feet into its halls. His insertion of a large round amphitheater filled with curved Asante stools, acquired over a year, brings a satisfying resolution to the large and sometimes hard-to-navigate interior. Called Parliament of Ghosts, Mahama says the installation represents “the failed democracy that we had in Ghana under Kwame Nkrumah from 1957 until the military coup in 1966.” The stools themselves hold deep history in their very materials and forms. “It’s the first time since the colonial period that this amount of objects have traveled to Europe, but not from a colonial perspective,” he asserts.
One of the key artists of his generation, Mahama has not just stayed in Africa, but has aimed to use art to make social progress there. “What does it mean to rebuild a world from a collective point of view?” he asks when we meet. He is a charming man who seems to have all the time in the world to engage, as one interlocutor approaches after the other. “What does it mean for solidarity? In the Global South, we have to deal with these issues all the time.”
For Mahama, to rebuild means ploughing all the profits he gains from sales in the West back into three centers of activity in Ghana. The initial complex, called Red Clay, he financed with the sale of his first work to Saatchi in 2014. On the 200 acres of land he purchased, he has built from scratch an impressive building, making bricks from the surrounding red earth, which is a cultural and arts hub. Open to everyone, children traverse its fields on their way to and from school.
The Cartier project has enabled him to acquire a glass factory that has been derelict for decades, a post-colonial initiative left to crumble. The neon sign originally made for the factory in 1961 currently hangs in the Foundation—part Martin Creed artwork, part readymade. A red-brick swimming pool created on the lower floor is filled with the green bottles that would have been produced there when Nkumah created this new industry, and on top are piled terracotta pots—a more historic part of the region’s economy.
The exhibition is called “The Harvest Season”—for its gathering of colonial and post-colonial history, and its idea of collectivity, which in this case means bringing together nine other artists, mostly from Ghana. “All these artists,” says Mahama, “respond to what I see as deficits in our history,” referring to the erasure of buildings, culture, and memory that, thanks to colonization, has punctuated the whole continent for several hundred years.
There is Gideon Appah, whose paintings draw on Ghanaian life, as well as dreams and memories, all set in vibrant West African landscapes. There is so much of his work on show, it’s like an exhibition of its own. Dorothy Akpene, the first woman able to teach art at the KUNST (Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology), and Mahama’s mentor, is honored here with a dazzling work she made in 2012. Set among Mahama’s own work, it is a dazzling figurative collage of shiny cotton ropes, kente cloth, parchment, and wool that establishes Akpene as a major player in the creation of textile artworks.
The artist Tjasa Rener explores the connections between Ghana and the former Yugoslavia, which were established in the late 1950s. Since leaving Slovenia (created after the dispersal of Yugoslavia) in 2016, Rener has been based in the Ghanaian capital of Accra and is represented here through installations that bring together personal narratives and political themes in paintings presented on traditional hand-painted Yugoslavian wallpaper. The German-Ghanaian Zohra Opoku searches for a cultural identity and investigates pressing African issues, including the dumping of fast fashion, in her work, often using photographs from her family albums, silk-screened onto old, pre-dyed fabrics.
And of course, no exhibition reflecting on Ghana’s history would be complete without nonagenarian James Barnor. The photographer created a definitive document of his country’s democratic liberation from 1957 onwards, and has been an inspiration to subsequent black photographers, including Tyler Mitchell. While all the other artists were present at the opening, Barnor’s age had kept him at home in London, where he finally moved at age 65. In the end, Ghana had not offered him a comfortable life despite his efforts and reputation.
“When I was a student, I was inspired by the work of Arte Povera artists like Alberto Burri,” confesses Mahama, naming the Italian who led a postwar movement that used humble materials to make art. But unlike Burri, Mahama’s materials talk explicitly of the extraction economy that has always made Africa a place that money only passes through. The jute sacks he uses contained the cocoa beans that made the West rich. “World resources still come from the global south, and we still don’t have access to the capital. Most artworks we produce also tend to end up in Western collections, which is why it’s important that my revenue comes back home,” says Mahama. “Then young people can believe that they can bring things into their own hands.”
Part of this involves changing art practice itself. “In Europe and America, art is produced to hang in homes and museums,” says Mahama. “But I see it as integral to the development of the state, and fundamental to the development of freedom.” The scale of the work—and the breadth and intensity of the exhibition—at Fondation Cartier surely represents the scale of his ambitions.
“Ibrahim Mahama: The Harvest Season” is on view at Fondation Cartier until Februrary 28, 2027