Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama: ‘Power is building structures, not visibility’

Ghanaian creator Ibrahim Mahama topped the 2025 ArtReview’s Power 100 list. | Photo Credit: Thulasi Kakkat/The Hindu

Ibrahim Mahama’s ‘Parliament of Ghosts’ astatine the just-concluded Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Kochi, India. | Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Kochi Biennale Foundation

Ibrahim Mahama’s Barovier solid enactment volition beryllium connected amusement astatine A Shea Garden in Venice, May-July. | Photo Credit: Galleria Barovier & Toso Ibrahim Mahama Photo RecordStudio

Ibrahim Mahama’s video enactment volition beryllium presented by Red Clay workplace with the corporate blaxTARLINES KUMASI astatine the 61st Venice Biennale. | Photo Credit: Galleria Barovier&Toso Ibrahim Mahama Photo Ernest Sackitey Courtesy Red Clay

Large-scale installations specified as Parliament of Ghosts travel betwixt sites successful Ghana, Europe and India, bringing materials marked by section governmental histories into interaction with caller publics and regimes of display. How bash you guarantee that the work’s specificity is not flattened into a generic representation of African situation oregon resilience astatine planetary biennales and museums acold from wherever those materials were archetypal used?

This is ever a tension, and I don’t deliberation it tin ever beryllium afloat resolved. But for me, the enactment resists flattening done its worldly condition. These objects are not representations — they transportation precise circumstantial traces: stains, smells, marks of use, inscriptions of labour. They are grounds of peculiar histories, not symbols of a wide condition. At the aforesaid time, I effort to stay attentive to context. In immoderate cases, similar successful India, it becomes important to enactment with materials that already beryllium determination alternatively than simply transporting thing from Ghana. This allows the enactment to participate into dialog with section histories of labour and circulation, alternatively of fixing it wrong a azygous narrative.

Also, the enactment functions arsenic a abstraction — [where] radical sit, gather, speak. Meaning is not fixed by the representation of the enactment but produced done encounters. The ‘ghosts’ are not a spectacle; they are activated done use, presence. I effort to make conditions wherever the work’s specificity continues to unfold, adjacent arsenic it moves crossed geographies.

Ibrahim Mahama’s video enactment with the corporate blaxTARLINES KUMASI volition beryllium astatine the 61st Venice Biennale. | Photo Credit: Galleria Barovier&Toso Ibrahim Mahama Photo Ernest Sackitey Courtesy Red

Has your emergence to the apical of ArtReview magazine’s Power 100 database for 2025, arsenic the archetypal fig from the African continent to pb that ranking, made you, an creator from Tamale and Accra, rethink ‘power’? What are the risks erstwhile an creator committed to decolonial and socialist imaginaries is celebrated by the precise structures of Euro-American creation satellite that erstwhile ignored specified work?

The thought of power, for me, has precise small to bash with visibility oregon designation wrong the creation world. It has much to bash with the capableness to physique and prolong structures implicit clip — spaces that tin outlive the idiosyncratic and displacement worldly conditions. That is wherefore I person ever tried to redirect immoderate comes from exhibitions oregon designation backmost into gathering institutions successful Tamale. At the aforesaid time, I americium precise alert of the contradictions. The aforesaid systems that erstwhile ignored these practices tin besides sorb them and crook them into symbols without transforming their underlying structures. There is ever a hazard that the enactment becomes neutralised, oregon that it functions arsenic a benignant of practice alternatively than a instrumentality for redistribution.

The question is however to stay grounded. For me, that means ensuring the enactment continues to nutrient existent conditions — education, access, infrastructure — alternatively than lone circulating arsenic an image. The superior generated done creation has to beryllium reinvested into gathering institutions and supporting communities, different the thought of powerfulness becomes empty.

Ibrahim Mahama’s Purple Hibiscus during installation astatine the Barbican, 2024. | Photo Credit: Courtesy Ibrahim Mahama, Red Clay Tamale, Barbican Centre, London and White Cube. © Pete Cadman, Barbican Centre.

In your installation Garden of Scars at the Oude Kerk Amsterdam, you enactment with casts from Amsterdam’s gravestones to that of the floors of Ghana’s Fort Elmina, bringing different geographies and histories into a walkable tract of fragments. How has making this enactment affected your ain consciousness of what a scar tin hold?

In Garden of Scars, I enactment with casts of gravestones from some Amsterdam and Fort Elmina successful Ghana, laying them crossed the level similar a tract of memory. The level itself is simply a tract of corporate history, wherever stories of merchants, colonisers, and the enslaved co-exist. The cracks, scars, and fractures successful these stones are not conscionable signs of decay — they are archives of lived histories, and erstwhile radical locomotion implicit them, they go portion of that speech betwixt past and present. A gravestone tin relation similar a scar connected the assemblage of time, enabling viewers to bespeak connected however histories overlap and intersect.The installation is not simply a humanities recounting, but an invitation to deliberation astir however memory, loss, resilience, and aboriginal possibilities are each contiguous successful a azygous space.

Your signifier often intervenes straight successful architectures that embody European modernity, from wrapping London’s Barbican successful textiles to veiling Kunsthalle Bern successful a tegument of jute sacks during a infinitesimal of organization transition. When you inhabit these buildings with materials and labour histories from Ghana, bash you deliberation of the motion arsenic repair, arsenic interruption, arsenic concern oregon arsenic thing person to sabotage of the universalist narratives those institutions person agelong projected?

I don’t spot the motion successful a azygous fixed way. It tin beryllium interruption, occupation, adjacent a benignant of quiescent sabotage but besides repair. These buildings often task a cosmopolitan past that excludes the conditions that made them possible. By bringing successful materials marked by labour and extraction, I’m inserting those absent histories backmost into the surface. The enactment destabilizes the authorization of the institution, but it besides asks whether that abstraction tin beryllium reimagined differently.

The ineligible battles astir your jute sack works, including your quality and eventual colony with dealers who chopped and framed the sacks against your wishes, highlighted your insistence connected however the enactment should circulate and what counts arsenic an authentic Mahama piece. How did that acquisition reshape your authorities of authorship, refusal and contractually, and successful what ways has it sharpened your strategies for resisting the extraction and mutilation of some your labour and the corporate histories that your materials carry?

For me, these sacks are not conscionable objects - they transportation the memory, effort, and stories of the radical who made them. That acquisition reinforced my committedness to controlling however my enactment circulates and to protecting some the corporate labour and the histories successful my materials. It taught maine to beryllium firm, but besides strategic, successful asserting authorship and ethical responsibility, truthful that the enactment tin question globally without losing its meaning oregon being reduced to a commodity.

Drawing from Rauschenberg’s assemblages, Smithson’s entropic landscapes, Arte Povera’s worldly refusal, Hazoumé and Anatsui’s found-object poetics, alongside Marx, Benjamin, Achebe, Adichie, Lazzarato, and Fela Kuti’s rhythms — your works go sites wherever representations migrate crossed materials, geographies, and temporalities. As W.J.T. Mitchell describes practice not arsenic specified depiction but arsenic a transformative process that redistributes bureau betwixt image, viewer, and world, however bash these citations displacement erstwhile transferred from literate page, theoretical treatise, oregon philharmonic groove into jute sacks, bid seats, oregon organization architectures, and what unexpected agencies look done that movement?

When ideas from artists and thinkers similar Rauschenberg, Smithson, Marx, Benjamin, Achebe, Adichie, Lazzarato, oregon Fela Kuti determination from mentation oregon substance into materials similar jute sacks, bid seats, oregon buildings, they bash not stay abstract — they go agents of transformation. Representation for maine is not a static depiction; it is simply a performative enactment that redistributes bureau betwixt object, viewer, and world. A jute sack, covered successful stains, names, and stamps from its beingness successful commodity exchange, carries not lone worldly past but besides societal and economical histories that invitation the spectator into a different benignant of encounter. In this question crossed mediums, what emerges is not an representation but a relational tract — a abstraction wherever stories, labour, memory, and powerfulness conscionable and are rearticulated. Through this process, practice becomes a tract of shared agency, wherever meaning is not delivered but enacted successful the ongoing relations betwixt people, place, and material.