The Artist: Ibrahim Mahama

“How do we build an institution that is based on raising the legacy of colonialism and reframe it into a gift?” asks Ibrahim Mahama when we sit together in a meeting room at White Cube Bermondsey in London, ahead of the opening of his exhibition The Harvest Season at Fondation Cartier in Paris.

It’s a Saturday afternoon, and Mahama is in London to meet with his gallerist before returning to Paris to continue the install. Building work is underway, and he expects the space to be transformed by the time he gets back.

After a brief catch-up, I pull out a stack of annotated papers. “What do you need all that for?” he laughs. “Don’t worry, we’ve got time.” He takes his iPad from a tote bag which he uses throughout to show me pictures of future plans.

Over the past decade, the Ghanaian artist has become internationally recognised for his vast installations made from discarded materials, from jute sacks to railway infrastructure. Alongside his rise in the Western artworld, he continues to build a network of cultural institutions in Tamale, northern Ghana, which are dedicated to making art accessible and bringing neglected parts of Ghana's history to wider attention.

For Mahama, these are not two separate projects. His artworks and the institutions are parts of the same practice, each informing the other. The Harvest Season makes that relationship clear, bringing the materials and ideas behind his work into direct conversation with the buildings and communities that have shaped it.

There is, however, an apparent contradiction in his approach. Mahama's ambitions in Ghana are partly funded by the Western art market, whose assumptions about art and institutions he hopes to challenge. He is unapologetically pragmatic.

Ibrahim Mahama, Ghana Mann Papapaaaa, 2023–24, charcoal drawing on archival papers, 215 × 497 cm. Courtesy the artist and White Cube (Theo Christelis).

“The Western commercial setting does its own thing, but I don't like to shy away from it because I think it's also necessary. It gives me the power to do what I'm doing,” he says.

How much of his social work is funded through commercial sales? “It's one of the ways I'm using so far," he says. "Before this, I never had any funding for my work.”

This revenue stream is not something he has always been able to rely upon. “The only money I got was through awards and a few colleagues who would support things here and there. But largely due to works that will be sold, I can put money back into my projects.”

He is aware of the tension. “It was important to think about the paradox within that," he says. “An artist using abandoned objects in decay to make art, and then part of the residual capital it produces, comes back through the new system. I wanted to deal with the logic of that.”

The context matters. It is not his prerogative to close the doors that are open. “The people telling you not to do something are often already living in Western privilege, where they have access to grants and funding," he says. "They're not living in Africa and telling you not to do it. They can’t tell me what to do.”

For Mahama, the question is not simply who owns art or where it is exhibited, but what an institution can do for the people around it. “We have different issues in the global south,” he says. “I call them institutions, art centres, studios, a museum, our spaces. Sometimes people call it Ibrahim's museum.”

Inside the Harvest

Three years in the making, The Harvest Season brings together works by nine artists and collectives with whom Mahama has collaborated. Spanning three floors, the exhibition explores the relationships he has built alongside his artistic practice.

Chris Dercon, Fondation Cartier's director, invited Mahama to develop the exhibition for its newly reconstructed nineteenth-century building, redesigned by architect Jean Nouvel and opened to the public in October 2025.

View from Ibrahim Mahama, The Harvest season , Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, 2026 Ibrahim Mahama, Season of Migration to the North , 2025-2026 Courtesy Ibrahim Mahama and Benoit Fougeirol.

“There was no brief,” Mahama says. “It came from an idea Chris had. He had been watching me build studios which were becoming institutions, collaborating with many artists and groups, and was interested in what it meant for an artist to build a campaign of this scale.”

Mahama is intent on emphasising the contributions of the other artists. “Of course, my name is on the show,” he says. “But it is not a solo exhibition.”

The exhibition presents Mahama as a collaborator and builder of a new type of collective institution. The other artists are given considerable space, with much of the second and third floors dedicated to their work. Many have achieved global recognition, including the Pace-represented Gideon Appah, Mariane Ibrahim's Zohra Opoku and Cercle d'Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC), who represented the Netherlands at the 2024 Venice Biennale. Perhaps it is precisely Mahama’s international reputation that makes such a collective presentation possible at Fondation Cartier.

Outside, in the Place du Palais-Royal, his familiar jute sack textiles hang like flag. Rather than covering the entire facade, as he has done elsewhere, they are cut into semicircular arches and suspended from frames, their patched surfaces set against Nouvel's architecture.

Inside, Mahama’s installations transform Nouvel’s ground floor into a succession of immersive spaces. A reconstructed factory, sections of railway infrastructure and vitrines of archival materials evoke the industrial histories that run through his practice.

In Parliament of Ghosts, almost century-old Asante wooden stools are arranged into an amphitheatre, cracked and repaired over decades of use.

Ibrahim Mahama, Parliament of Ghosts, 2023, hay, Red Clay, Tamale Courtesy of the artist, Ernest Sackitey and Red Clay.

“These ones were living through the same time, and they never stopped being used,” he says of the stools. “They kept living their lives, were broken, repaired and moved back and forth. Today, these are far more valuable than the objects they have in the museums here in London.”

Another major installation, The Harvest Season (2026), comprises ten ‘textile collages’ suspended from the ceiling. Among their materials are remnants from a former Ghanaian rubber factory, including knitting needles and worn textiles, transformed into intricate compositions whose surfaces retain the marks of industry.

The works are most interesting when their materials remain recognisable. Rusted tableware and factory remnants carry evidence of their former use. Elsewhere, the interior jute sacks are cut to size, negotiating for space amid fire exits, lifts and bathrooms. Mahama's work is most compelling when these two identities – industrial objects and artwork – remain in dissonance.

The Threads That Bind

The exhibition introduces artists and educators who have influenced Mahama. Among them is Dorothy Akpene Amenuke, his former teacher at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), and the first woman to teach there. Her textile work How Far How Near (2012) incorporates jute sacks for transporting cocoa – perhaps showing the lineage of Mahama's practice.

Appah, born in 1987 like Mahama and also a graduate of KNUST, contributes around 30 works to show, each conjuring figures and imagined landscapes. Appah, whose mother was a seamstress, often cuts his canvases in two before sewing them back together, leaving visible marks that echo the ‘scars’ of Mahama's Asante stools.

Collage provides another connection between the artists. Mahama, the pioneering 97-year-old photographer James Barnor, Opoku, Amenuke and Appah all bring together materials and images from different sources, suggesting a shared interest in how collective memory can be assembled.

Gideon Appah, Lovers Park 2 , 2020, acrylic on canvas, 188 × 252 cm. Courtesy the artist, Nii Odzenma and Gallery 195.

My Father Insisted I Study Art

That interest began early. Mahama's father, an engineer who helped build bridges, roads and schools, encouraged his son to be an artist.

“Against my own will, my father insisted I study art. I had to do it. I had no choice,” he says.

This relationship between art and architecture is not simply a matter of scale. Mahama’s installations are regularly dismantled, transported and rebuilt in new locations. He compares the process to archaeology: excavating a fossil or reassembling a dinosaur skeleton.

“When I rebuild a piece of architecture, the question now is: what does it become?” he says. “It's almost like an autopsy.”

But the structures are ‘empty vessels’ without the people who use them. “They are social sculptures,” Mahama says. “In the western art world, people often access my work through visual media, and only later realise the work is part of a much larger system.”

In Ghana, by contrast, local communities often encounter Mahama through his community work before they learn about his art. The distinction is fundamental: where the international artworld sees objects and installations, he wants to create places that have a life beyond their function as artworks.

Ibrahim Mahama, digital preparatory drawing for the Things Fall Apart installation, 2024. Courtesy Ibrahim Mahama.

Building Beyond the Gallery

Mahama was born in Tamale, a city of 370,000 residents, closer to the border of Burkina Faso than Accra. To pursue a career in art in the more traditional sense, many would have based themselves in the capital, or moved abroad. Mahama has travelled plenty, and is represented by the London gallery White Cube. But he has also decided to remain based in Tamale, and has set about repurposing found spaces into art institutions. He founded The Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art (SCCA) in 2019, Red Clay in 2020 and Nkrumah Volini in 2021-22.

Each serves a different purpose: SCCA is an artist-run exhibition and research space; Red Clay is his home, studio and educational centre, with decommissioned aeroplanes converted into classrooms that welcomes hundreds of schoolchildren each week. For Nkrumah Volini, Mahama excavated an underground storage reservoir once used for grains and cereals and designed to support food supply in northern Ghana. Derelict for years, it is now a lecture space and community venue.

These spaces provide opportunities for artists, and are an effort to establish cultural infrastructure in a region far from the international centres through which his own career has developed.

The distinction between a Mahama artwork and an institution becomes increasingly difficult to maintain. A structure that might appear in a European museum as an installation can, in Ghana, become a space in which people gather, learn and produce work of their own. Its success should therefore not be measured by the experience of viewing alone.

Yet the scale of Mahama's ambitions raises practical questions. His international success has helped make these projects possible, but how will they be sustained over time? How independent can they become of the artist whose reputation and resources made them possible? The Western commercial system may provide the means to establish an alternative cultural infrastructure, but it also leaves it exposed to the fortunes of an individual artistic career.

Other internationally successful artists have pursued similar projects. Mark Bradford cofounded Art + Practice in Leimert Park, Los Angeles, in 2014. Theaster Gates has developed cultural spaces through his Rebuild Foundation in Chicago. In Nairobi, Michael Armitage established NCAI in 2020.

From left to right : Zohra Opoku, Sunsum, 2026 Ibrahim Mahama, Between heaven and earth, 2026 Dorothy Akpene Amenuke, The Scroll, 2016, Zohra Opoku, série The Myths of Eternal Life, 2020 Courtesy Benoît Fougeirol.

For Mahama, Gates is an important influence.

“Theaster was one of the first artists who recognised me as an artist,” he says. “He and Steve McQueen were the two artists that approached me at the 2015 Venice Biennale. I developed a relationship with Theaster, visited his studio in Chicago, and was so impressed by the spaces he had. I realised I could do it too.”

Mahama was not dissuaded from doing it in his home of Tamale, despite the traditional lack of artistic infrastructure in Ghana. “Sure, there are more resources in America," he says. "But that makes it even more urgent in the context of Africa. Knowing about Mark Bradford and other artists coming together made me realise its urgency.”

A Different Kind of Legacy

Mahama has spent much of the year travelling, sketching future plans on his iPad. He shows me photographs of a decommissioned bridge he is taking to Red Clay. A section of railway track also appears in The Harvest Season.

“We've been transporting it across different landscapes and rivers in the country,” Mahama says. “As the bridge began oxidising, dust settled and birds dropped seeds, allowing grass and plants to grow. The bridge was becoming a forest. It was very poetic, so beautiful.”

By mid-2027, he plans to unveil three new spaces: The Old Russian Cemetery, Datoogili, an old colonial fort in Tamale, and a section of living forest, which he might name The Forest, but it remains undecided. “I'm trying to see how to revive the forests and incorporate them into spaces where artists can make work in dialogue with ecology.”

The cemetery will become a space for commissioning artists. I ask whether the bodies will remain buried.

“Yes,” he says. “I'm going to give a very new perspective to what the cemetery is.”

Throughout our conversation, Mahama keeps returning to Tamale. The materials encountered in Paris connect to the projects in Ghana. He wants visitors to see Red Clay in a glass bottle, SCCA in a tapestry and Nkrumah Volini in a collage of factory papers.

Perhaps the most revealing works in this enormous exhibition are among its smallest. In a series of photographic collages, images of Fondation Cartier taken by Jean Nouvel are layered with photographs of Mahama's own building projects in Tamale, and workers carrying materials that now fill the galleries.

The construction sites are layered to appear in unison, but the differences in funding, influence and international visibility between these institutions remain enormous. Mahama's achievement may be less about overcoming those inequalities than finding ways to work within them, while building something that might eventually outlast him.

“They are one. For me, they have always been one,” he says.