I had first seen this work at the 2023 Venice Biennale. In Kochi, at the disused Anand Warehouse in Mattancherry, his chamber represented unrealised futures of Ghanaian independence and development: jute bags once used to transport pepper and timber became the walls, while chairs in various sizes and shapes lined up to create, over the course of the sixth edition of KMB, a site for book launches, workshops and public conversations.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe materials \u2014 train seats, lockers, fragments of infrastructure \u2014 carry within them very specific historical trajectories. They belong to a moment when the promise of independence was closely tied to ideas of industrialisation, mobility, and collective progress. At the same time, many of these projects were interrupted, abandoned, or never fully realised…I\u2019m interested in what it means to stay with these residues rather than move past them. The \u2018ghosts\u2019 are not only about loss,\u201d says Mahama. \u201cThey are also about the persistence of unrealised possibilities… For me, the question is not how to rebuild the parliament that never fully existed, but how to imagine new forms of assembly and citizenship that emerge from the fragments we have inherited.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"Ghanaian](\"https:\/\/th-i.thgim.com\/public\/incoming\/wwfkfw\/article70818400.ece\/alternates\/FREE_1200\/10018_11_12_2025_19_21_36_4_GHANAIANARTISTIBRAHIMMAHAMA_04.JPG\" "\\"Ghanaian")
<\/div>\n\n
Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama topped the 2025\u00a0ArtReview<\/i>\u2019s\u00a0<\/i>Power 100 list.
\n | Photo Credit:
\n Thulasi Kakkat\/The Hindu\n <\/p>\n
<\/div>\n Mahama\u2019s work explores how infrastructures of trade and empire shape contemporary life. He\u00a0has directed the profits from his shows towards opening art institutions in his hometown of Tamale, Ghana: the Red Clay Studio, the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art (SCCA) and Nkrumah Volini, a space for exhibitions.\u00a0Next month, the 38-year-old cultural figure will return to the world\u2019s most important art event, Venice Biennale, where he will be part of a global line-up of artists engaging with themes of history, labour and postcolonial memory.<\/p>\n \n Ibrahim Mahama\u2019s \u2018Parliament of Ghosts\u2019 at the just-concluded Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Kochi, India. <\/div>\n At its 61st edition, Mahama will present a video work with the collective blaxTARLINES KUMASI. As a collateral event to the Biennale, he will also present in Venice his solo show\u00a0A Shea Garden <\/i>(May-July), developed in collaboration with Barovier & Toso and in partnership with Apalazzogallery, which has worked and collaborated with the artist since 2014. Excerpts from an interview:<\/p>\n \n Ibrahim Mahama\u2019s Barovier glass work will be on show at A Shea Garden <\/i>in Venice, May-July. <\/div>\n \n Ibrahim Mahama\u2019s video work will be presented by Red Clay studio with the collective blaxTARLINES KUMASI at the 61st Venice Biennale. <\/div>\n Also, the work functions as a space \u2014 [where] people sit, gather, speak. Meaning is not fixed by the image of the work but produced through encounters. The \u2018ghosts\u2019 are not a spectacle; they are activated through use, presence. I try to create conditions where the work\u2019s specificity continues to unfold, even as it moves across geographies.\n <\/p>\n<\/div>\n \n Ibrahim Mahama\u2019s video work with the collective blaxTARLINES KUMASI will be at the 61st Venice Biennale. <\/div>\n \n The question is how to remain grounded. For me, that means ensuring the work continues to produce real conditions \u2014 education, access, infrastructure \u2014 rather than only circulating as an image. The capital generated through art has to be reinvested into building institutions and supporting communities, otherwise the idea of power becomes empty.\n <\/p>\n<\/div>\n \n Ibrahim Mahama\u2019s Purple Hibiscus during installation at the Barbican, 2024. <\/div>\n The writer is a Gurugram-based curator, author and collector.<\/i><\/p>\n<\/div>\n![\"Ibrahim](\"https:\/\/th-i.thgim.com\/public\/society\/wno5fg\/article70818403.ece\/alternates\/FREE_1200\/2.%20Ibrahim%20Mahama%20Parliament%20of%20Ghosts%20Kochi-Muziris%20Biennale%20Kochi%20India%20Courtesy%20of%20the%20Kochi%20Biennale%20Foundation.jpg\" "\\"Ibrahim")
<\/div>\n
\n | Photo Credit:
\n Courtesy of the Kochi Biennale Foundation\n <\/p>\n![\"Ibrahim](\"https:\/\/th-i.thgim.com\/public\/society\/6fjuis\/article70818405.ece\/alternates\/FREE_1200\/8.%20Galleria%20BarovierToso_Ibrahim%20Mahama_Photo%20RecordStudio.jpg\" "\\"Ibrahim")
<\/div>\n
\n | Photo Credit:
\n Galleria Barovier & Toso Ibrahim Mahama Photo RecordStudio\n <\/p>\n![\"Ibrahim](\"https:\/\/th-i.thgim.com\/public\/society\/s4ps4n\/article70818404.ece\/alternates\/FREE_1200\/11.%20Galleria%20BarovierToso_Ibrahim%20Mahama_Photo%20Ernest%20Sackitey_Courtesy%20Red%20Clay.jpg\" "\\"Ibrahim")
<\/div>\n
\n | Photo Credit:
\n Galleria Barovier&Toso Ibrahim Mahama Photo Ernest Sackitey Courtesy Red Clay\n <\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.thehindu.com\/theme\/images\/th-online\/interview-quest-icon.svg\"\/){kind=icon}
\n Large-scale installations such as\u00a0Parliament of Ghosts\u00a0<\/i>travel between sites in Ghana, Europe and India, bringing materials marked by local political histories into contact with new publics and regimes of display. How do you ensure that the work\u2019s specificity is not flattened into a generic image of African crisis or resilience at international biennales and museums far from where those materials were first used?<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.thehindu.com\/theme\/images\/th-online\/interview-ansr-icon.svg\"\/){kind=icon}
\n This is always a tension, and I don\u2019t think it can ever be fully resolved. But for me, the work resists flattening through its material condition. These objects are not representations \u2014 they carry very specific traces: stains, smells, marks of use, inscriptions of labour. They are evidence of particular histories, not symbols of a general condition. At the same time, I try to remain attentive to context. In some cases, like in India, it becomes important to work with materials that already exist there rather than simply transporting something from Ghana. This allows the work to enter into dialogue with local histories of labour and circulation, instead of fixing it within a single narrative.<\/p>\n![\"Ibrahim](\"https:\/\/th-i.thgim.com\/public\/society\/3v5rzc\/article70818407.ece\/alternates\/FREE_1200\/10.%20Galleria%20BarovierToso_Ibrahim%20Mahama_Photo%20Ernest%20Sackitey_Courtesy%20Red%20Clay.jpg\" "\\"Ibrahim")
<\/div>\n
\n | Photo Credit:
\n Galleria Barovier&Toso Ibrahim Mahama Photo Ernest Sackitey Courtesy Red\n <\/p>\n
\n Has your rise to the top of\u00a0ArtReview\u00a0<\/i>magazine\u2019s Power 100 list for 2025, as the first figure from the African continent to lead that ranking, made you, an artist from Tamale and Accra, rethink \u2018power\u2019? What are the risks when an artist committed to decolonial and socialist imaginaries is celebrated by the very structures of Euro-American art world that once ignored such work?<\/p>\n
\n The idea of power, for me, has very little to do with visibility or recognition within the art world. It has more to do with the capacity to build and sustain structures over time \u2014 spaces that can outlive the individual and shift material conditions. That is why I have always tried to redirect whatever comes from exhibitions or recognition back into building institutions in Tamale. At the same time, I am very aware of the contradictions. The same systems that once ignored these practices can also absorb them and turn them into symbols without transforming their underlying structures. There is always a risk that the work becomes neutralised, or that it functions as a kind of representation rather than a tool for redistribution.<\/p>\n![\"Ibrahim](\"https:\/\/th-i.thgim.com\/public\/society\/z1mm5b\/article70818410.ece\/alternates\/FREE_1200\/13.%20Ibrahim%20Mahama%E2%80%99s%20Purple%20Hibiscus%20during%20%20installation%20at%20the%20Barbican%202024.Courtesy%20Ibrahim%20Mahama%20Red%20Clay%20%20Tamale%20Barbi.jpg\" "\\"Ibrahim")
<\/div>\n
\n | Photo Credit:
\n Courtesy Ibrahim Mahama, Red Clay Tamale, Barbican Centre, London and White Cube. \u00a9 Pete Cadman, Barbican Centre.\n <\/p>\n
\n In your installation\u00a0Garden of Scars\u00a0<\/i>at the Oude Kerk Amsterdam, you work with casts from Amsterdam\u2019s gravestones to that of the floors of Ghana\u2019s Fort Elmina, bringing di\ufb00erent geographies and histories into a walkable field of fragments. How has making this work a\ufb00ected your own sense of what a scar can hold?<\/p>\n
\n In\u00a0Garden of Scars<\/i>, I work with casts of gravestones from both Amsterdam and Fort Elmina in Ghana, laying them across the floor like a field of memory. The floor itself is a site of collective history, where stories of merchants, colonisers, and the enslaved co-exist.\u00a0The cracks, scars, and fractures in these stones are not just signs of decay \u2014 they are archives of lived histories, and when people walk over them, they become part of that conversation between past and present. A gravestone can function like a scar on the body of time, enabling viewers to reflect on how histories overlap and intersect.The installation is not simply a historical recounting, but an invitation to think about how memory, loss, resilience, and future possibilities are all present in a single space.\n <\/p>\n
\n Your practice often intervenes directly in architectures that embody European modernity, from wrapping London\u2019s Barbican in textiles to veiling Kunsthalle Bern in a skin of jute sacks during a moment of institutional transition. When you occupy these buildings with materials and labour histories from Ghana, do you think of the gesture as repair, as interruption, as occupation or as something closer to sabotage of the universalist narratives those institutions have long projected?<\/p>\n
\n I don\u2019t see the gesture in a single fixed way. It can be interruption, occupation, even a kind of quiet sabotage but also repair. These buildings often project a universal history that excludes the conditions that made them possible. By bringing in materials marked by labour and extraction, I\u2019m inserting those absent histories back into the surface. The work destabilizes the authority of the institution, but it also asks whether that space can be reimagined di\ufb00erently.\n <\/p>\n
\n The legal battles around your jute sack works, including your dispute and eventual settlement with dealers who cut and framed the sacks against your wishes, highlighted your insistence on how the work should circulate and what counts as an authentic Mahama piece. How did that experience reshape your politics of authorship, refusal and contractually, and in what ways has it sharpened your strategies for resisting the extraction and mutilation of both your labour and the collective histories that your materials carry?<\/p>\n
\n For me, these sacks are not just objects – they carry the memory, e\ufb00ort, and stories of the people who made them. That experience reinforced my commitment to controlling how my work circulates and to protecting both the collective labor and the histories in my materials. It taught me to be firm, but also strategic, in asserting authorship and ethical responsibility, so that the work can travel globally without losing its meaning or being reduced to a commodity.\n <\/p>\n
\n Drawing from Rauschenberg\u2019s assemblages, Smithson\u2019s entropic landscapes, Arte Povera\u2019s material refusal, Hazoum\u00e9 and Anatsui\u2019s found-object poetics, alongside Marx, Benjamin, Achebe, Adichie, Lazzarato, and Fela Kuti\u2019s rhythms \u2014 your works become sites where representations migrate across materials, geographies, and temporalities. As W.J.T. Mitchell describes representation not as mere depiction but as a transformative process that redistributes agency between image, viewer, and world, how do these citations shift when transferred from literary page, theoretical treatise, or musical groove into jute sacks, train seats, or institutional architectures, and what unexpected agencies emerge through that movement?<\/p>\n
\n When ideas from artists and thinkers like Rauschenberg, Smithson, Marx, Benjamin, Achebe, Adichie, Lazzarato, or Fela Kuti move from theory or text into materials like jute sacks, train seats, or buildings, they do not remain abstract \u2014 they become agents of transformation. Representation for me is not a static depiction; it is a performative act that redistributes agency between object, viewer, and world. A jute sack, covered in stains, names, and stamps from its life in commodity exchange, carries not only material history but also social and economic histories that invite the viewer into a di\ufb00erent kind of encounter. In this movement across mediums, what emerges is not an image but a relational field \u2014 a space where stories, labour, memory, and power meet and are rearticulated. Through this process, representation becomes a site of shared agency, where meaning is not delivered but enacted in the ongoing relations between people, place, and material.\n <\/p>\n<\/div>\n