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

Large-scale installations such as Parliament of Ghosts travel between sites in Ghana, Europe and India, bringing materials marked by local political histories into contact with new publics and regimes of display. How do you ensure that the work’s specificity is not flattened into a generic image of African crisis or resilience at international biennales and museums far from where those materials were first used?

This is always a tension, and I don’t think it can ever be fully resolved. But for me, the work resists flattening through its material condition. These objects are not representations — they carry very specific traces: stains, smells, marks of use, inscriptions of labour. They are evidence of particular histories, not symbols of a general condition. At the same time, I try to remain attentive to context. In some cases, like in India, it becomes important to work with materials that already exist there rather than simply transporting something from Ghana. This allows the work to enter into dialogue with local histories of labour and circulation, instead of fixing it within a single narrative.

Also, the work functions as a space — [where] people sit, gather, speak. Meaning is not fixed by the image of the work but produced through encounters. The ‘ghosts’ are not a spectacle; they are activated through use, presence. I try to create conditions where the work’s specificity continues to unfold, even as it moves across geographies.

Has your rise to the top of ArtReview magazine’s Power 100 list for 2025, as the first figure from the African continent to lead that ranking, made you, an artist from Tamale and Accra, rethink ‘power’? What are the risks when an artist committed to decolonial and socialist imaginaries is celebrated by the very structures of Euro-American art world that once ignored such work?

The idea of power, for me, has very little to do with visibility or recognition within the art world. It has more to do with the capacity to build and sustain structures over time — spaces that can outlive the individual and shift material conditions. That is why I have always tried to redirect whatever comes from exhibitions or recognition back into building institutions in Tamale. At the same time, I am very aware of the contradictions. The same systems that once ignored these practices can also absorb them and turn them into symbols without transforming their underlying structures. There is always a risk that the work becomes neutralised, or that it functions as a kind of representation rather than a tool for redistribution.

The question is how to remain grounded. For me, that means ensuring the work continues to produce real conditions — education, access, infrastructure — rather than only circulating as an image. The capital generated through art has to be reinvested into building institutions and supporting communities, otherwise the idea of power becomes empty.

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

In Garden of Scars, I work with casts of gravestones from both Amsterdam and Fort Elmina in Ghana, laying them across the floor like a field of memory. The floor itself is a site of collective history, where stories of merchants, colonisers, and the enslaved co-exist. The cracks, scars, and fractures in these stones are not just signs of decay — they are archives of lived histories, and when people walk over them, they become part of that conversation between past and present. A gravestone can function like a scar on the body of time, enabling viewers to reflect on how histories overlap and intersect.The installation is not simply a historical recounting, but an invitation to think about how memory, loss, resilience, and future possibilities are all present in a single space.

Your practice often intervenes directly in architectures that embody European modernity, from wrapping London’s Barbican in textiles to veiling Kunsthalle Bern in a skin of jute sacks during a moment of institutional transition. When you occupy these buildings with materials and labour histories from Ghana, do you think of the gesture as repair, as interruption, as occupation or as something closer to sabotage of the universalist narratives those institutions have long projected?

I don’t see the gesture in a single fixed way. It can be interruption, occupation, even a kind of quiet sabotage but also repair. These buildings often project a universal history that excludes the conditions that made them possible. By bringing in materials marked by labour and extraction, I’m inserting those absent histories back into the surface. The work destabilizes the authority of the institution, but it also asks whether that space can be reimagined differently.

The legal battles around your jute sack works, including your dispute and eventual settlement with dealers who cut and framed the sacks against your wishes, highlighted your insistence on how the work should circulate and what counts as an authentic Mahama piece. How did that experience reshape your politics of authorship, refusal and contractually, and in what ways has it sharpened your strategies for resisting the extraction and mutilation of both your labour and the collective histories that your materials carry?

For me, these sacks are not just objects – they carry the memory, effort, and stories of the people who made them. That experience reinforced my commitment to controlling how my work circulates and to protecting both the collective labor and the histories in my materials. It taught me to be firm, but also strategic, in asserting authorship and ethical responsibility, so that the work can travel globally without losing its meaning or being reduced to a commodity.

Drawing from Rauschenberg’s assemblages, Smithson’s entropic landscapes, Arte Povera’s material refusal, Hazoumé and Anatsui’s found-object poetics, alongside Marx, Benjamin, Achebe, Adichie, Lazzarato, and Fela Kuti’s rhythms — your works become sites where representations migrate across materials, geographies, and temporalities. As W.J.T. Mitchell describes representation not as mere depiction but as a transformative process that redistributes agency between image, viewer, and world, how do these citations shift when transferred from literary page, theoretical treatise, or musical groove into jute sacks, train seats, or institutional architectures, and what unexpected agencies emerge through that movement?

When ideas from artists and thinkers like Rauschenberg, Smithson, Marx, Benjamin, Achebe, Adichie, Lazzarato, or Fela Kuti move from theory or text into materials like jute sacks, train seats, or buildings, they do not remain abstract — they become agents of transformation. Representation for me is not a static depiction; it is a performative act that redistributes agency between object, viewer, and world. A jute sack, covered in stains, names, and stamps from its life in commodity exchange, carries not only material history but also social and economic histories that invite the viewer into a different kind of encounter. In this movement across mediums, what emerges is not an image but a relational field — a space where stories, labour, memory, and power meet and are rearticulated. Through this process, representation becomes a site of shared agency, where meaning is not delivered but enacted in the ongoing relations between people, place, and material.