If we are lucky, we will experience several great loves in a lifetime. For Ibrahim Mahama, art has always been number one. “I always loved art,” he said. “It’s my first love. I would do anything for it.” And when he says “anything,” he means it. His work has seen him envelop entire buildings with swathes of hand-stitched sacks, and build monumental installations out of hollowed-out aircraft, colonial-era bridges, and decommissioned railway carriages.
And yet, Mahama told me: “I never thought that I was going to become a contemporary artist. I only thought I was going to make art.” This changed in 2013, when Saatchi Gallery took an interest in his work, including him in the show “Pangaea: New Art from Africa to Latin America” in 2014. “Before this, I was just experimenting in the studio, doing guerrilla exhibitions around the city and sharing my work with local communities. When the international aspect came, I realized that there was more to do.”
Since then, the Ghanaian artist has exhibited all over the world and founded three art centers in his hometown of Tamale in Ghana. In 2025, he was named top of ArtReview’s Power 100. Utilizing archives, reclaimed materials, and everyday objects, his practice confronts history, global trade, and the enduring legacies of colonialism in Africa head on. His latest exhibition, “The Harvest Season,” is opening to coincide with Art Basel Paris this week at the Fondation Cartier. It’s an ambitious, collaborative undertaking which brings together nine artists and collectives, including James Barnor, Zohra Opuku, Gideon Appah, and Fera Wardak.
Throughout Mahama’s practice, he transforms discarded materials into repositories of memory, recognizing how objects are marked by the economic, social, and political systems through which they have passed. “Humanity has a way of cleaning its history and its image, but material forms come to embody the histories that they live through. I like using old materials because they contain a lot of truth within them.”
The exhibition features the original jute sacks that Mahama began working with in 2012, that were once used to transport cocoa beans, alongside rubber from a decommissioned rubber company, terra-cotta pots made by women in northern Ghana, and charcoal drawings on historical receipts. Together, these materials trace the entanglement of labor, commerce, and colonial history, revealing how ordinary objects can bear witness to much larger systems of exploitation and exchange.
“I believe that audiences are really going to connect with this exhibition, both materially and architecturally,” Mahama said. The artist has worked closely with the architecture of Cartier’s new space, which opened in October 2025. Defined by glass and steel, with long bay windows and expansive skylights, the building offers a sense of openness that has informed the exhibition’s design. “We built the exhibition so that nothing is blocked, and at any point in time, you are able to see through it from one end to the other.” As in much of his work, scale is equally important. Several monumental installations occupy the vast spaces, commanding attention while drawing the viewer into a shared, physical experience. “It becomes so magnificent that people cannot deny it. It becomes part of their reality.”
The exhibition opens with Mahama’s iconic Parliament of Ghosts (2025–26), an assembly of traditional wooden Asante stools, arranged to resemble a life-size parliamentary chamber, a space for gathering and discussion. “The stools were carved in the southern part of Ghana in the 19th and 20th centuries, and they hold a history of craftsmanship. A lot of them were broken, and we had to repair them before bringing them to Paris.” The act of repair is central to Mahama’s approach; these objects are not simply preserved as relics of the past, but also open new conversations. “Through these objects, we can ask new questions.”
Historically, stools of this kind were taken from Ghana as colonial loot, subsequently entering Western museum collections and presented as ethnographic objects. Here, they reclaim a different kind of agency, inviting audiences to reconsider whose voices are historically remembered.
For Season of Migration to the North (2025–26), Mahama was inspired by the Aboso Glass Factory in western Ghana. Founded in 1966, it was once the largest glass factory in sub-Saharan Africa, before being decommissioned and demolished despite community protests in 2025. Reflecting on a visit to the abandoned site, which he called a “living archive,” Mahama recalled: “There are plants, animals, and trees growing in between spaces. I thought that was important to pay attention to.”
Using funds from the Fondation Cartier commission, Mahama acquired materials from the defunct factory and partly reconstructed it at the Fondation Cartier. Here, Mahama has filled a red-brick swimming pool with emerald-green bottles, produced during Ghana’s post-independence era, topped with an assortment of terra-cotta pots that evoke the region’s rich craft traditions. The artwork invites audiences to consider the fate of collective infrastructure and the possibilities of rebuilding from remnants of the past.
Throughout his practice, Mahama has consistently embraced working collectively. For the artist, this approach enables collaborators to pool their intellectual resources and aspirations in order to build something that otherwise could not be achieved. Accordingly, “The Harvest Season” includes nine artists with whom Mahama has previously worked, including the radical Congolese collective CATPC (Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise) whom the artist visited in 2018. Its members approach art as a means of economic and political emancipation, using capital generated from art sales to buy back contaminated land to repair and restore it. Here, their surreal sculptures of animalesque figures are cast primarily from plantation-harvested cacao, critiquing the exploitative structures of the global commodity chain.
For CATPC, as for Mahama, art is inseparable from the social and political realities it inhabits. “One of the most important things that an artist can exercise is a sense of responsibility. And I think it is the responsibility of the artist to find a way to redistribute art and whatever sensibilities that come along with it. Because what point is there in making art when many people cannot access it?”
In this show, as in Mahama’s previous works, harvesting is not simply an act of gathering what history has left behind, but a way of reckoning with the past. “We are harvesting the decay of history, colonial memory, and our present human condition,” as Mahama put it. “At the same time, we are harvesting promises for the future. We are harvesting how we want to see the world going forward.”
from Artsy News https://ift.tt/Gvxb0Pm
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