Ibrahim Mahama (born 1987 in Tamale, Ghana) is a Ghanaian contemporary artist known for his large-scale installations, sculptures and architectural interventions that explore global trade, commodification, labor, economic inequality, migration, and the socio-political legacies of colonialism in Africa.[1] Mahama transforms everyday materials, such as jute sacks used in commodity exchange and abandoned infrastructure, into works that engage with collective memory and historical narratives.[2][3]
Mahama is the founder of the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art (SCCA), Red Clay Studio, and Nkrumah Voli-ni in Tamale, which serve as platforms for exhibitions, research, and community-based learning.[5] In 2024, he was named the 14th most influential artist on ArtReview's Power 100 list and in 2025 received the Art Basel & UBS Artist of the Year Award.[6][7][8][9]
Red Clay Studio, Tamale, GhanaParliament of Ghosts, Tamale, Ghana
Early Life and Education
Mahama was born in 1987 in Tamale, Ghana, the ninth of ten siblings in a polygamous family. Growing up in a large family environment influenced his ability to work collaboratively and recognize connections across different social contexts.[10] His grandfather lived in a car repair shop in Accra, while his father, a civil engineer and road contractor in Tamale, inspired his early fascination with industrial materials and labor systems.[10] From a young age, he enjoyed drawing and found a sense of peace through creative expression.[11] He attended boarding school from the age of five to twelve, followed by two years at a Catholic school before transferring to a boarding school for his secondary education. In high school, he chose to specialize in visual arts, encouraged and supported by his father.[12]
He went on to study fine art at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Kumasi, where he specialized in painting and sculpture, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting in 2010, a Master of Fine Arts in Painting and Sculpture in 2013, and a PhD in Fine Art in 2015.[13]
During his time at the university, Mahama became increasingly interested in how materials carry memory, particularly found objects such as jute sacks, wood, and metal that reflect the movement of goods, labor, and histories across borders.[13] His early installations, often composed of stitched-together jute sacks, were shown at the local market in Accra.[14] He has described his time at university; "For us it was more about producing work that would somehow change the relationship between art and the market - and create new forms of the market in the future."[15] His works were also exhibited on the University building and the Railway Station, marking the beginning of his conceptual approach to art as a tool for critical engagement, civic dialogue, and architectural intervention.[16]
Mahama credits art educator Kąrî'kạchä Seid'ou from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology and the pedagogy of blaxTARLINES KUMASI with shaping his understanding of art as a transformative social tool.[17] Seid'ou's notion of art as a "gift to society" remains central to Mahama's philosophy of art-making and institution-building.[13] He is today a member of blaxTARLINES KUMASI.[17][13]
Artistic Practice
Mahama describes his artistic practice as a form of "time travel", using discarded materials such as jute sacks, train parts, shoe-shine boxes, sewing machines, school desks and bureaucratic records to reimagine narratives of postcolonial identity, economic failure, and social transformation.[18][19] He has said that "art reflects a collective history. It is a response to histories and specific spaces, such as buildings. That an abandoned project from an earlier century can inspire creativity in the current century, presents a hugely effective potential for the future."[20]
Central to his work is "trying to find out what art is" and the deconstruction of historical contexts marked by crisis or collapse, through which he excavates the generative and transformative possibilities that emerge from such moments. He has said "I use crisis and failure as the primary material in my work to be able to produce and develop new language and aesthetics."[21] His large-scale installations, created in collaboration with artisans, technicians, traders, and local communities, engage themes of labor, migration, globalization, economic exchange, and resilience.[22][23][24]
Documentation through photography, sound, oral histories, and archives plays a vital role in preserving and activating the social and material histories embedded in his practice.[25] Mahama often incorporates architecture as a conceptual and material element, describing his approach as "We never really think about how a building is constructed, the labor that goes into it, and where the capital comes from. So this is where my work comes in. I use architecture as a tool to reorganize our thinking."[26]
Education, research, and cultural infrastructure are central to Mahama's expanded practice.[26] Through his institutions in Kumasi and Tamale; the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art (SCCA), Red Clay, and Nkrumah Volini, he supports experimental pedagogy, local knowledge production, and intergenerational learning.[27][28] These spaces serve as schools, studios, libraries, archives, and exhibition venues. With the hope that the access will allow schoolchildren to realise "the transformative quality of art."[29] They enable new ways of thinking about art's role in society and offer models for building cultural ecosystems from within. He has said "It's very important not to leave Ghana. You want to feel 30 years from now that you were part of the struggle, that you have helped to build this country."[3]
Mahama has participated in several artist residencies, including the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm in Berlin and Occupy Atopos in Athens (2017–2018), Gasworks in London (2013), Atelierhaus Hilmsen in Germany (2012), and multiple residencies at OFKOB (Occupy Farmstead Kokobeng) in Ofoase Kokobeng, Ghana (2013, 2014, 2015), a self-initiated project space focused on community, agriculture, and experimental art practice. Mahama also lectures widely at institutions such as Pratt Institute, contributing to global conversations on contemporary African art, decolonial theory, and socially engaged practice.[30]
Mahama has referenced Robert Rauschenberg's approach to assemblage, Robert Smithson's engagement with landscape and peripheral spaces, along the Arte Povera movement and African contemporaries such as Romuald Hazoumé and El Anatsui, known for their innovative use of found materials to address cultural and historical themes, as inspiration.[9][31]
Mahama's work takes inspiration from postcolonial literature and music, including Karl Marx's Das Kapital (1867), Walter Benjamin's essay The Author as Producer (1934), Chinua Achebe's No Longer at Ease (1960), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), and Maurizio Lazzarato's The Making of the Indebted Man (2012), as well as the music of Fela Kuti.[32][5][33] Several of his artworks and exhibitions take their titles from African literature, including; A Spell of Good Things (2024, White Cube New York) references the novel by Nigerian writer Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀, Fragments (2017, White Cube London) draws from the novel by Ghanaian author Ayi Kwei Armah, while Purple Hibiscus (2023–24, Barbican Centre, London) and Half of a Yellow Sun (2022, White Cube Hong Kong) is titled after Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's novels.[34][35][9]
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Mahama contributed to Designboom's "Messages of Hope" series with cultural figures.[36] He shared images from Red Clay studio in Tamale, accompanied by the reflection: "The promises of the present can start with ghosts from both the future and past. Ghosts are an embodiment of failed revolutions and unrealized futures, which need to be used as a starting point for new conversations within this century and beyond. Every life form is a gift."[36]
Career
Ibrahim Mahama rose to international prominence through large-scale, site-specific interventions using stitched-together jute sacks.[11] Stamped with the Product of Ghana, the jute sacks were originally used to transport the country's top export cocoa, charcoal, and other goods, bearing the marks of trade, labor, and global circulation.[33][37] Through a process of exchange, Mahama acquired the sacks from markets and workers, embedding in them a layered social memory of use, value, and negotiation. In Mahama's work, the sacks are transformed through community-based processes of stitching them together into monumental tapestries that drape buildings and public structures.[2][38]
At the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015, Mahama gained international recognition with his large-scale installation Out of Bounds, in which he wrapped two prominent walls of the Arsenale with stitched jute sacks. Curated by Okwui Enwezor, he installation marked a turning point in his career, attracting significant critical attention.[41] It was during the Biennale that Mahama met Susan May, Artistic Director at White Cube, which began representing him shortly thereafter.[35]
At Documenta 14, held in Athens and Kassel in 2017, Mahama presented two major site-specific installations that engaged public architecture through material and memory:[42][4]
Check Point Prosfygika (Athens, Syntagma Square and Prosfygika housing complex) involved sewing hundreds of discarded charcoal sacks imported, worn, and stamped with trade markings into expansive textile surfaces that covered public plazas. The collaborative performance, involving migrants and local residents, emphasized their labor and communal histories while addressing global trade networks and economic precarity.
Check Point Sekondi Loco. 1901–2030 (Kassel, Torwache) featured the wrapping of Kassel's historic gatehouse in jute sacks, scrap metal, tarpaulins, metal tags, and leather from a Henschel locomotive. The work interrogated the politics of infrastructural spaces and transformed the site into a critical commentary on capitalist circulation and colonial-era trade commodities.
In 2019, as part of Frieze Sculpture in New York, Mahama unveiled his first large-scale public installation in the city by replacing 50 of the 192 UN flags at Rockefeller Center with hand-stitched jute flags made in Ghana.[43][44]
In 2019, Mahama represented Ghana in its first-ever national pavilion at the Venice Biennale titled Ghana Freedom.[45][46] He was the youngest artist featured. His installation, A Straight Line Through the Carcass of History 1649, curated by Nana Oforiatta Ayim and designed by architect David Adjaye, used colonial-era railway components, wooden grills, and other salvaged materials to explore Ghana's post-independence history.[47] The work questioned narratives of liberation and progress, presenting decaying industrial infrastructure as a metaphor for unrealized political and social transformation.[48][17]
Also in 2019, Mahama presented Parliament of Ghosts at the Manchester International Festival.[49][50] Constructed from 120 second-hand train seats arranged to resemble Ghana's Parliament, along with abandoned railway parts, train carriages, and colonial-era station furniture, the installation formed a civic space reflecting on the ambitions and failures of Ghana's post-independence era. He said at the time: "Everything here bears the residue of history. My interest comes from the workers who made these seats and the people who used these trains to get to work. Their labour haunts the seats."[32] The work has since been permanently installed at Mahama's Red Clay campus in Tamale, where it functions as a cultural assembly hall, a site for public discourse, and a platform for education and research.[51]
In 2023, Mahama was appointed Artistic Director of the 35th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts, becoming the first African artist to lead the historic Slovenian exhibition.[52][53] Under the theme From the Void Came Gifts of the Cosmos, Mahama collaborated with Exit Frame Collective, Alicia Knock, Selom Koffi Kudjie, Inga Lāce, Beya Othmani, and Patrick Nii Okanta to explore anti-colonial and anti-imperial struggles through the medium of printmaking.[54] The project drew inspiration from Ghana's post-independence infrastructure and sought to revive historical connections between Ghana and Slovenia. The biennale featured new commissions and existing works by artists and collectives including Otobong Nkanga, Mireille Kaboré, and the Kuhle Collective.
Using proceeds from his first major international exhibition at Saatchi Gallery in London, Mahama purchased a 40,000-square-meter plot of land near Tamale, Ghana, to address the lack of formal arts education in the region.[55][56] Since 2014, he has developed three major institutions, transforming it into a cultural campus that integrates art, education, and community development.[15] The campus welcomes more than 100,000 visitors a year, and functions as an ongoing and evolving cultural project that reflects Mahama's artistic practice and commitment to sustainable growth.[57] Proceeds generated through this model are continually reinvested into the campus's long-term development.[24][58][59][60][61]
Curator Azu Nwagbogu wrote in ArtReview that Mahama "seeks to leverage his position and renown to help remediate present conditions in Ghana by building infrastructure in order to enable long-term collaborations between citizens and institutions; between artists, curators and cultural producers across the continent and in diaspora through institution-building towards a fundamentally engaged and integrated methodology of art practice for the benefit of society at large."[5]
Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art (SCCA Tamale)
Opened in March 2019, SCCA Tamale is a 900-square-metre multidisciplinary art space and research hub dedicated to contemporary African and diasporic art.[33][62] Under the leadership of Artistic Director Selom Kudjle, it functions as both a 15-room residency and exhibition venue, fostering critical engagement and public dialogue.[63][64][5]
Notable exhibitions include:
Galle Winston Kofi Dawson: In Pursuit of Something 'Beautiful', Perhaps…, March 15 – 15 August 2019 The inaugural exhibition at SCCA Tamale was a retrospective celebrating Ghanaian modernist Galle Winston Kofi Dawson's multifaceted body of work, curated by Bernard Akoi-Jackson.[5]
Akutia: Blindfolding the Sun and the Poetics of Peace, 4 September 2020 – 7 March 2021 A retrospective of Ghanaian artist Agyeman Ossei (Dota), showcasing works inspired by Asante culture, philosophy, and folk music, presented in collaboration with Red Clay.
A Diagnosis of Time: Unlearn What You Have Learned, April 30 – 3 November 2021 A collaborative exhibition with ARoS Aarhus Art Museum and the Ghana Museums and Monuments Board, examining the concept of time through diverse media including paintings, sculptures, and cultural objects.
Existing Otherwise: The Future of Coexistence, January 14 – 30 April 2022 A hybrid curatorial project featuring artists such as Zanele Muholi, Ato Jackson, and Selom Kudjie, exploring alternative narratives and coexistence in post-pandemic societies.
Dig Where You Stand, September 2 – 9 October 2022 Curated by Azu Nwagbogu and presented by the African Artists' Foundation, this exhibition investigated regenerative artistic practices and their potential to challenge extractive economic systems.
Red Clay Studio
Red Clay Studio is an art and cultural institution founded in 2020 in Janna Kpeŋŋ, near Tamale, Ghana.[27][65] It serves as Mahama's studio and as a hybrid learning space built from locally sourced red clay bricks. The site's artistic director is Esinam Damalie.[66]
Red Clay Studio includes warehouses, exhibition halls, outdoor gathering spaces, and repurposed structures such as grounded British colonial-era train carriages and six Soviet-era aircraft converted into libraries, cinema rooms, and classrooms for local children.[2] Notably, a Star Bow aircraft was transported from Accra to Tamale in December 2019, crossing the Volta River, and now serves as an educational space on site.[67][68]
A key permanent installation is Parliament of Ghosts, originally shown in Manchester in 2019 and now reinstalled at Red Clay Studio. This chamber-like structure reimagines political power and colonial architecture, inviting reflection and dialogue.
With 2000 school children visiting a week, Red Clay Studio's programming includes free educational workshops in robotics, solar energy, drone piloting, coding, and interdisciplinary creative activities.[35] The institution's mission reflects Mahama's commitment to ensuring that access to culture, critical thinking, and technical skills is not limited by geography.[35]
Nkrumah Voli-ni
Nkrumah Voli-ni is an educational and cultural space founded in 2022.[29] The artistic director is Ernest Sarkitey.[55] It was named after an abandoned grain silo complex in Tamale, Ghana. The name connects directly to Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana's first president and a key figure in the country's independence movement.
The silos date back to the Nkrumah era (1957–1966) and were part of ambitious state-driven industrial and agricultural modernization projects. They were built to store and distribute grain to support national food security and rural development, symbolizing Nkrumah's vision of economic self-reliance and collective infrastructure for the newly independent nation.[69] Over time, many of these silos fell into disuse and decay. By transforming this abandoned site into an educational and artistic space, Mahama preserves a piece of local industrial history but also critiques the unrealized promises and failures of modernist development projects, turning a monument of past ambition into a platform for future learning, creativity, and community dialogue.[70]
During the restoration of the silo, Mahama discovered a large colony of bats living in the rafters.[70] Rather than displace them, he chose to preserve their habitat, integrating them as co-inhabitants of the space. This gesture informed several works, including his 2021 exhibition Lazarus at White Cube, where suspended sculptures resembling bats were crafted from oil-drenched tarpaulin and steel rebar.[71] In his 2020–2021 exhibition As the void, vali and voli at Apalazzo gallery, Mahama incorporated images of bats into large-scale works that layered archival receipts, photographs, and architectural motifs from Ghana.[72] Works such as Siiko and Leno used the bat as both ecological and symbolic figure, evoking themes of resilience, care, and shared habitation across species and histories.
Long-distance Friendships, Kaunas Biennial, Lithuania
O Quilombisimo: Of Resisting and Insisting. Of Flight as Fight. Of Other Democratic Egalitarian Political Philosophies,Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin
Parliament of Ghosts, 18th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, Italy
When the Heavens Meet the Earth, Selected Works from the Robert Devereux Sina Jina Collection of Contemporary Art, The Heong Gallery at Downing College, Cambridge, UK
Ibrahim Mahama has been featured on ArtReview's annual Power 100 list of the most influential people in the contemporary art world in 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024.[7] He has also been featured on The Africa Report's list of the 100 Most Influential Africans.[121]
He has received several notable awards and recognitions, including:
2025: Established Artist Award, Art Basel, Basel[6]
2010: Paa Kwame Award, Department of Painting, KNUST, Kumasi, Ghana
Curators have praised both the conceptual depth and civic impact of his practice; Koyo Kouoh, director of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town, has described Mahama's work as "communal and generative," noting that he has forged a "distinctive way to connect the critical reading of history with community‑oriented art‑making." Similarly, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, director of the House of World Cultures in Berlin, has called Mahama "one of the world's greatest archivists," adding, "this brother wants to go far. His timescale is 1,000 years."[9]
Gemma Curtin, curator of Waste Age: What Can Design Do? at the Design Museum in London, noted Mahama's "interest in the process of making things, the labour that goes into it and the impact of that process on people and place."[13]Azu Nwagbogu, Curator and Founder of the African Artist Foundation, has highlighted "Mahama balks at Western ideas around conservation, viewing them as undermining of artistic progress in Africa; rather, he sees the function of institutions in terms of their being drivers of progress and mechanisms through which to engineer the refreshing of ideas."[5]
Marie-Ann Yemsi, curator of Ubuntu, a Lucid Dream at the Palais de Tokyo, has said that "Ibrahim is playing a huge part in decolonising the imagination."[13] Alison de Lima Greene, curator of Afro-Atlantic Histories at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, has described Mahama's work as "a very important corrective to that idealised colonialist vision."[13]
In 2013, Ibrahim Mahama became involved in a legal dispute with art dealer Stefan Simchowitz and gallerist Jonathan Ellis King.[125] The case concerned the unauthorized alteration and sale of Mahama's jute sack works.[126] Mahama alleged the dealers had modified and sold the works without his consent, violating his moral rights under the Visual Artists Rights Act. The dealers claimed they had an agreement to produce and sell derivative pieces. The parties reached a confidential settlement in 2016.[127]
Personal life
Mahama resides in Ghana and is married to Khadija Yussif Iddi.[128]
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