Fig. 1. Sketches and research notes. Courtesy of the artist.
Fig. 2. Sketches and research notes. Courtesy of the artist.
There was a deep sense of history within these objects, concerning what they had gone through or what they had witnessed. In relation to the circulation capital, the bodies of women and men who’ve worked in local markets over the years have also been shaped by the weight of objects. Wherever you notice a specific condition, it is not because the people actively chose it. Rather it was shaped by history. When I’m producing my work, I’m also thinking about its meaning in relation to the entire world.
RW: In the documentary you say, “Money is a residue of a system that is broken,” which is a simple statement that fits the metaphor of the scar in the landscape.
Fig. 3. Left: Ibrahim Mahama with local community in Tamale, Ghana. Courtesy of the artist. Right: Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da, The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, ca. 1601.Oil on canvas. Stiftung Preußische Schlösser and Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg.
IM: The whole point of Red Clay has been to build an institution from the decay of time and history. This railway line that we’re building is a shared project, because many kids and even adults, like my father’s generation, have never seen or known a train line before. And yet their lineage is connected through its labor forms. Reconnecting capital to local context is a priority of mine (figs. 3–5). For instance, Ivory Coast and Ghana are the producers of half of the cocoa in the world, and yet the market size of these natural resources is a fraction of the chocolate industry. Some of that revenue comes back to the countries in a small amount through charities and nongovernmental organizations to dig boreholes, stop child labor, and other very basic things. Capital has always been brutal. Again, in my work I’m thinking about what it means within the art world: What happens when an artist makes an object and then art transforms it into something else?
RW: How did you step into the art market as such and see that it could be instrumental to this capital transformation you were thinking of in our world?
Fig. 4. Sketches, research notes, and photographs. Courtesy of the artist.
Fig. 5. Archive photograph and installation of railway line in Tamale, Ghana. Courtesy of the artist.
IM: I studied painting and sculpture from my undergrad through my PhD. The idea was that, as an artist, if you’re making a painting, you want to make something that is beautiful and that people can acquire, because it’s also part of your career and practice. You have to live from it, but it becomes very difficult to be able to take yourself back to ground zero. One of my professors in art school said we have to think about ways in which we can transform art from commodity to a gift.
When I produce work in Ghana, I must think about the basic point of living, like getting access to drinking water. Unlike here, where, after you return from a protest, there is electricity and water at home. It becomes about survival in that sense. In Ghana we also don’t have access to grants. The work, however, transformed into something that becomes radical and comes back into the landscape as more than an object. The kids see me and understand the story that art can produce a different reality. Sometimes you think, In order just to be able to restore some faith in the broken system, we have to find ways around it.
RW: When some kids ask you, “How did you construct Red Clay?” your simple answer is, “I work.” And, of course, there is a lot more behind that. How do you think capital, labor, and your work relate to each other in a system that can be different?
IM: I’ve always thought about the idea of redistribution. When I was in art school, my mentor was a Marxist, and he had a deep influence on us. Politician Kwame Nkrumah was also a very important character, and so was activist Marcus Garvey in terms of the Black Star Alliance. When Nkrumah came back to Ghana in the 1940s to be the secretary of the Gold Coast Convention Party, there was a disconnect between the leadership and what the people were going through. Nkrumah planned to build institutions that could somehow restructure the relationship of people to the place that they’re in. That’s what I focus on in my practice. How do we redistribute that thing that is called art, that is supposed to be common? As artists we always talk about the fact that art is supposed to be common and everyone is supposed to have access to it. When you look at the art system, you realize that it is not the case.
The money I make from the art market I use to buy these old objects that the state is supposed to preserve. The state sells them to scrap dealers, and I have to buy it from them at a very high price, equal to the price of steel on the world market. After I transport it six hundred kilometers to the north, I can transform it into art and strip the entire history of the capital away from it. Art opens up here a space for impossible forms, things that we never imagined (figs. 6–7).
Fig. 6. Installation of railway line in Tamale, Ghana. Courtesy of the artist. The installation at Red Clay Studio is made out of residues of the Ghana Railways dating back to the 1890s.
Fig. 7. Group photos in the railway line installation in Tamale, Ghana. Courtesy of the artist.
Fig. 8. Sketches, research notes, and photographs of airplane repurposed into classroom at Red Clay Studio. Courtesy of the artist.
RW: You are creating different values: economic and artistic. At the same time, by going through this creation process, you encourage the value of believing in new histories and possibilities.
IM: The value of belief is the most important here. It’s almost as if we have to excavate so deep in order to be able to search and find courage. In collecting all these objects and building this (figs. 8–10), the idea is that the kids within the community own these objects, and they find ways in which they can learn and share their knowledge among themselves. I’ve always said that if the world is going to transform or change, then we need to be able to build a system that can allow people to be courageous enough to be able to think and express themselves.
Fig. 9. Teachers and students going through archival materials and objects collected and displayed at Red Clay Studio. Courtesy of the artist.
Fig. 10. Teachers and students of the local community in Tamale, Ghana. Courtesy of the artist.
RW: How do we find that courage within an art institution of which we all know about their history and their connection to an economic system. How do you think your artistic practice can be valuable for state institutions?
IM: I understand how Western institutions operate, and I try to negotiate because you want to get things done. When I was a master’s student in 2012, there was an exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam titled Time, Trade & Travel. Some curators visited Ghana looking for artists. I presented my portfolio, but I didn’t get into the exhibition, which I was very sad about at the time. Later I realized that maybe it was a gift, because I needed more time to think about what I was doing with my work.
Most artists outside the Western hemisphere assume that the Western institutions have the answer, because there is access to capital and infrastructure. I began to see that there were a lot of loopholes, because it also didn’t allow for certain commissions to happen. One time the projects that I could do as an art student in Ghana were limited to the bureaucracy of Western institutions. All institutions, and even we ourselves, should ask “Who are we making it for?” when we’re producing something.
When traveling around the world and visiting art institutions, you notice how most of the security guards are minorities. However, most of their audience is middle-class white people. You ask yourself, Is it that some kids are designed not to go to the museum? No. It’s the way the museum system has been structured over the centuries. For us to be able to infiltrate that, we need to rethink why that institution exists for its community.
RW: There are smaller institutions we can learn from, and maybe the practice in a smaller institution can be much more accessible in the end.
IM: I don’t necessarily think so. We have the Parliament of Ghosts at Red Clay (fig. 11). Its idea is that it can allow for different kinds of forms to take place. It’s not just about the human being in the center but also thinking about the object’s place. We can use that format and go to a community that is so far away that you have to cross two or three rivers to get to it. Through a simple thing such as a computer screen, we can share and we can find other ways of bringing the kids or the people in that community to connect within the institution. I think there are so many different models, particularly now that we’re living in this age of technological advancements.
Fig. 11. Local community at the Parliament of Ghosts in Red Clay Studio. Courtesy of the artist.
RW: Is your work with train cars and airplanes also a metaphor for connecting?
IM: In 2018 it was the first time we were able to get one of these objects up to the studio. It just needed to happen, to be able to realize its possibility in terms of what those objects could do, as they move through the landscape and the relationship of people to them. My mother took one of these Ghana Airways planes in 1987, when I was born, to Mecca, and later the plane was decommissioned when the airline went bankrupt. I bought one of these same planes, and the idea was to transform the plane into an exhibition space to present a retrospective of photographer James Barnard. The plane had been rebranded for a private airline, and some artists and I had to do photographic archival research to transform it back to the 1980s branding. As we transported it from the south to the north of the country, all the way to the border of Burkina Faso, we stopped in communities and the kids would come inside the plane
Fig. 12. Left: Ibrahim Mahama, Non-Orientable Nkansa, 2017. Mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo: White Cube. Right: Ibrahim Mahama, Non-Orientable Nkansa, 2017. Mixed media, dimensions variable. Red Clay public collection, Tamale, Ghana. © the artist. Photo © Red Clay Tamale (Ernest Sarkitey).
Fig. 13. Teachers and students traveling and visiting Red Clay Studio in Tamale, Ghana. Courtesy of the artist.
RW: Before we go to Unravel, is your art more about transformation than other artists, or is it [transformation] key for everything you would like to create?
IM: I think it’s just about transformation, which comes in many different forms and relationships. There’s a work that I made called The Nonrentable, made up of residue of shoemaker boxes [which traditionally contained all the tools needed to polish and repair shoes] from old and decaying postindependence factories. It was exhibited at the White Cube gallery in London and later installed at Red Clay (fig. 12). In London you take the Tube, you go and see the space, and you go back home. Whereas in Tamil, when we put up the work as part of the permanent collection, we have to arrange buses to bring the audiences. There was a school that wanted to come to connect with the work and visit the institution. The school had a bus, but they didn’t have fuel. The teacher convinced the school they should convert the excursion into a physical education exercise (fig. 13). They had to wear their sports uniforms and run [approximately] forty kilometers. . . to connect with art. At that point the transformation goes beyond the work that I’m doing.
In another case a tricycle rider brings people to the studio (fig. 13). He’s so interested and in love with what he sees, like, “Oh, I never knew art could be this way in relation to architecture, blah, blah.” He goes home in the morning, and this is during COVID-19—this image is about three years old—and then he closes his work for the day. He brings all the kids into his house to see the studio and what it offers in terms of the vision he saw and in terms of the work. Normally we would say that this tricycle rider doesn’t understand what art is. I remember when I started building this studio in the north. Because I didn’t grow up in the north, I decided to go there and build a studio. I was born there, and people said, “But why would you build it in this place? It’s so unsophisticated. The people there don’t understand art.” I said, “No, art is about freedom and emancipation, and freedom is not a point we’re trying to get to.” It’s the starting point.
We have to imagine that we’re free, to begin with, and then we can start from that point of view. If you imagine, if you think there is something called art and these people don’t understand that, then you have gotten it wrong to begin with. How do we start. . . How about we start from the point of saying we understand that art is complex? It’s broad, and different people have always related to it in very different ways. Though we are going to start from a point of ground zero; let’s start from there, and collectively we can all land together. I think that is where a glimpse of transformation can start.
Amanda Pinatih (AP): After talking about Red Clay Studio, I would love for us to discuss your use of textiles in your work that you use for subversive ends. In the exhibition Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art, more than forty-five artists use textile materials to express themselves, to tell stories about life experiences, or to push back on existing power structures. Your work DIMANG BE YOLI is one of the many on display (fig. 14). Could you tell us more about this particular work and the materials you used to make it?
Fig. 14. Ibrahim Mahama, DIMANG BE YOLI (right), 2019. Scrap metal, tarpaulin, and metal tags on jute sacks. 225 × 245 × 12 cm. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Peter Tijhuis.
IM: The work is made out of burlap sacks, which were very important to me when I was a university student because I was experimenting with materials (fig. 15). Around 2011 I was visiting a friend in Burkina Faso, and I was stuck at the border. I saw an excessive amount of this material carrying goods and commodities across the border. It struck me, and I thought, When I come back to the studio after this visit, I’m going to make work with this material. I went to the markets, and I realized that the market women were using them for various things. The more important element was that when they used it for the transportation of charcoal, the charcoal stained it to a point where it could no longer be used for any other commodity.
AP: And there is also metal. Could you tell a little bit more about the other materials you use in that work?
Fig. 15. Archive photographs of burlap sacks produced in Ghana. Courtesy of the artist.
IM: That particular work has these single-use metal tags to close the bags when they are coming from India and Bangladesh. If you read it carefully, you realize that this metal tag has “QC” written on it, which means “quality control.” In Ghana they are primarily used for the transportation of cocoa. The bags are taken from the produce-buying companies to the port, where they open them with a cut to empty the contents, and all “packaging” material is then disposed. All that work from India, the labor—everything is diminished. This is when it becomes interesting, because we can give a new life to this material. The market women in Africa buy it, they write their names on it, and they give it a new function. Sometimes they even stitch African prints to repair them, so the material becomes like flesh. For me nothing goes to waste. I’m always looking at how to squeeze life out of materials to make them into a work.
AP: Is it also noteworthy that these bags were used and they lived this life before and maybe have memories attached to them?
IM: I made a lot of different projects with this material in 2016. First, in Ghana, with the National Theatre, later at Charlottenborg in Copenhagen and some other buildings (fig. 16). With a jute sack the reason why I mostly use it with the architecture was because in the mid-twentieth century, a lot of the money that we made from selling cocoa was what was used in building a lot of the infrastructure in Ghana. I somehow wanted to reestablish that dialogue with the material. The National Theatre was like the old silos that were built by Kwame Nkrumah that were abandoned, some of which even I bought and then transformed into public spaces.
Fig. 16. Clockwise from top left: Ibrahim Mahama, A Friend, 2019, at Caselli Daziari (Tollgates) di Porta Venezia, Milan. Ibrahim Mahama, TRANSFER(S), 2023, at Kunsthalle Osnabrück, Osnabrück. Ibrahim Mahama, Nyhavn Kaplang, 2016, at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen. Ibrahim Mahama, Malam Dodoo National Theatre, 1992–2016, charcoal jute sacks at the National Theatre of Ghana, Accra. Courtesy of the artist.
I was invited by the Barbican Art Gallery to do an installation in their building, for which I submitted an initial proposal that jokingly addressed the terrible English weather and the fact that we needed something a bit more bright (figs. 17–18). Already when I was collecting the jute sacks in 2012, I collected the smocks that I used for the Barbican project. I used them to make smaller works. My gallery has sold some of these works over the last couple of years, but I never made them into a monumental work because they were very strong colors and materials. When the Barbican came along, I decided that for this brutalist building and its history of labor, why don’t we explore this material in its full essence?
Fig. 17. Early sketches for Ibrahim Mahama, Purple Hibiscus, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.
Fig. 18. Ibrahim Mahama, Purple Hibiscus, 2024, at the Lakeside Terrace, Barbican Art Gallery, London. Photo: Dion Barrett. Courtesy of the artist and Barbican Art Gallery.
AP: This commission has around 2,500 square meters of beautiful woven textiles and ceremonial smocks, called batakali. The project was also handwoven by more than one thousand craftspeople. What else can you tell us about the meaning of these textiles and about all the people that supported making it?
IM: The reason why I was collecting these materials was that they had this literal embodiment of DNA on them, because people wear them and keep them for a lifetime. They are passed on to the next generation. People also rarely wash them, so when you look inside, there is always sweat. When you ask someone to give you this textile, you are actually asking them to give you part of their soul.
People are very superstitious in Africa, so when I first asked for this material, people thought it would produce dark magic. They said that the only way to ensure it was not charmed was to pee on it, because for Islam it would mean the spirits that were in it will leave the cloth. I was like, “Oh, as an artist, that’s even fantastic.” Then, when we were sewing this work, I wanted everything to be done by hand. I commissioned so many weavers after designing the fabric, and then we gave it to all the weavers in the region, and they wove it from different parts. We rented the Aliu Mahama Sports Stadium in Tamale as a studio space to put it all together (figs. 19–21). I worked with the men and women over three months, because I wanted everything to be done by hand and because you experience it on such a large scale and it feels like an industrial material, but it’s a preindustrial material. In the end, when you see it, it looks like an African textile, but the base fabric is sourced from China. That is also the paradox about the work to begin with.
Fig. 19. Making of Ibrahim Mahama, Purple Hibiscus, 2023–24, at the Aliu Mahama Sports Stadium in Tamale, Ghana. Courtesy of the artist.
Fig. 20. Aerial view of the making of Ibrahim Mahama, Purple Hibiscus, 2023–24, at the Aliu Mahama Sports Stadium in Tamale, Ghana. Courtesy of the artist.
Fig. 21. Aerial views of the making of Ibrahim Mahama, Purple Hibiscus, 2023–24, at the Aliu Mahama Sports Stadium in Tamale, Ghana. Courtesy of the artist.
AP: Yes, because you didn’t just wrap it. You went over all the large elements of the Barbican building. There is a video where you can see all these people hanging from the building and stitching it by hand. What could we also learn about the stitching of what the people are doing here on top of the building?
IM: The Barbican building itself was made from casting concrete, made by hand. They hand-chipped the concrete surface to give it a texture. For me it was about the dialogue of the idea of removing the front after the cast, versus putting the material on it and then stitching. It was also about that relationship between this idea of taking away and later adding new elements.
AP: I think it also ties into the idea that, by wrapping buildings, you are actively hiding something, but you reveal something as well.
IM: We had some controversies with some of the residents in the Barbican. Like, “Why are you wrapping the building? It’s such an ugly work,” and I thought: At least it invokes a feeling.
AP: You can’t make everyone happy, but at least there are some emotions.
IM: No one ever said a work of art has to be completely beautiful. Sometimes it is repulsive. As long as there was a dialogue involved, for me that was the most important thing. After it was wrapped it actually invoked even more conversations. When it is uninstalled then suddenly there’s an emptiness, there’s a sense of loss.
Question 1: What happened to all the pieces that were wrapped around the Barbican? Were they sold?
IM: No, they were sent back to Ghana, but I haven’t had a chance to show the work at home yet. The idea was to restage the work in a space there and show the documentary film that shows the making of the work. Probably we’ll show the film at the stadium, and then we will wrap a building in the city, and then we will have a dialogue. When we were making it, a lot of the people back home used to make comments like, “This is absolute nonsense. Why are we sewing these materials together? We should be sewing clothes. You’re talking about wrapping a building with it. It doesn’t make any sense.” Suddenly, when they see the images of the work at the Barbican, they’re like, “Oh, interesting. We didn’t imagine it in this way.” Certainly I feel it’s also a sense of responsibility for us to be able to bring that work within that context.
Question 2: Thanks, Ibrahim. My question is about the difference of context. If you want to cover architecture, do you experience any differences doing installations between countries? What do you want to cover, and what do you want to reveal?
IM: The most important thing about the work in Ghana is that you have total control over what you choose, because it’s a fully independent project. I’m always thinking about the possibilities that could arise from the work. With the Barbican I was invited to do a commission to engage a particular site. Certainly also within the context of Europe, there are people who go to see art exhibitions, and when they see the wrapped building they understand that it is an artwork. In the context of Ghana, when you do it and people see it, there are different conversations that happen. Sometimes it’s not even about a question of art, but of material or the economy. The point is that there’s supposed to be some kind of dialogue within that.
Question 3: Hi, I’m really excited that you’re here, because I’m from Ghana as well. I’ve been following your work for a while, and I really love the fact that you work with your community. I’ve seen different groups visiting Red Clay Studio. How did you come to design the architecture of it, and how does it function for your practice?
IM: The interesting thing about Red Clay is, I was in university when I did the first drawings for the building, but I had to stop at a point and I was like, Okay, maybe I’ll come back to it later. In 2014, when I had my first show in London at Saatchi Gallery and a work was bought, that was the money I used to actually start the building. By that time I was already doing research into the railway. I actually went into the railway and I looked at some of the blueprints of the buildings and also looked at the space, because I was using the railway space as a studio space to produce. I decided to use that as a model to build Red Clay while also reflecting on the soil and the land. I bought the land. It was in a farming community. Then we started building from scratch; I never imagined that it was going to be as it is now. In the first image I showed this large complex with residences and archaeological space, archives of Parliament, a cinema, a greenhouse, the trains, and the planes. All of that was not in my mind. I was in doubt about it, because what does it mean to build a studio in a place where there are no markets? My mentor said, “Imagine that your studio could influence a new generation of artists and thinkers—that alone is transformative.”
It leads to something, because you have to think about art beyond the objects that you are going to make. As I kept working on the process, I realized the choices I was making in terms of architecture—leaving the walls open, allowing for natural daylight to come into it for natural ventilation, and so forth. Even around the sustainability of the institution, it also went a long way to influence the relationship of people to the space. If you’re building, a studio is supposed to be a place where constantly things are transforming and changing. I decided to keep it at that level and at that point so that constantly we could find ways in which we could push it further, but more so thinking about it in relation to the needs within the community.
In Tamale Red Clay is the only public space in the entire city. There are no parks, no cinema—nothing. If you live in a city like Amsterdam, you take it for granted. For me it’s also that question about the practice: How does the studio, in terms of everything that it is trying to do on earth, including all the precarity, become an open ground for all of us to be able to share within? That’s where the architecture comes into place.
Question 4: Thank you so much for your interesting words. I was thinking about your few key concepts like transformation and also freedom. Freedom not as the end point, but the starting point. What would you like your audiences to transform within themselves? Or is there a freedom they experience when they feel your work?
IM: It’s a difficult one. Certainly you cannot determine what people can take from the work you produce. I think that responsibility starts from a place of generosity and ethics. At least if you’re doing something that you know, deep down in your heart, you feel it is urgent and it’s something that humankind and the planet needs. Then you put all that you believe into it and hope that it will do something. That is where I come from. People always asked me, “But do you imagine all the work that you’ve done—what if everything collapses or fails tomorrow?” I respond to that, “At least we tried, because we believe that we deserve better.”
Question 5: Is hope, then, the essential word?
IM: Yes, hope is very important. Once we lose hope then there is no point in being here to begin with.
Question 6: Do you have any advice for starting artists here in the audience?
IM: It’s about belief. One of the mistakes that starting artists make, even before they begin, is to have an expectation. You don’t need to have any expectations. Whatever you’re making you’re making it because you believe in it and you believe that it’s going to have a real impact in the world. Once you understand what those things are, you are then able to go just pour your heart into producing it. There are so many artists who make work, and probably their works are discovered after they passed away. I always say that I was lucky, because it was so timely in terms of everything coming together—like the professors I had, the transformation that was happening in the art school in Kumasi, the work that I was producing, the people that I met in the early part of my career, and the decisions I made. It doesn’t always happen for all of us in that way. Whatever you’re doing, just believe in it, and just keep doing it, and share it as much as possible. Most starting artists want to keep a lot to themselves, because they think someone will steal their ideas. No, just share, produce, and believe.
Ibrahim Mahama (b. 1987, Tamale, Ghana) uses strategies of reclamation and assemblage to make works with found materials that engage with histories of crisis and failure. Community is at the heart of his practice and his large-scale work is often made in collaboration with others. Mahama often wraps historical architecture in fabric, researching moments of intersection and tension between the location of the work and West Africa. As well as being an artist, Mahama is a curator and educator, and he is dedicated to creating opportunities for creativity in Ghana. Since 2019 he has opened three educational spaces in the country, including the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art (SCCA), an artist-run project space; Red Clay, his studio with research facilities and a residency programme; and a disused silo that he has converted into a cultural centre.
