30 Years 30 Stories — a series of inspiring voices celebrating the Fund’s 30-year anniversary of supporting culture under pressure.
This story was originally published in the Prince Claus Awards 2020 book. Interview by Fariba Derakhshani.
All images courtesy of the artist and White Cube.
Ghanaian artist, Prince Claus Awardee, and ArtReview's most influential figure in the art world of 2025, Ibrahim Mahama is known for transforming everyday materials and abandoned infrastructures into powerful reflections on history, labour, and collective imagination.
Working across large-scale installations, architecture, and cultural initiatives, his practice expands the possibilities of what art can be and how it can shape communities. In interview below, Mahama reflects on the experiences and ideas that shaped his journey, discussing imagination as a transformative force and the role of art as architecture for building new worlds.
Was there a moment, a point in time, when you knew what you wanted to achieve with your work?
Frankly, it started at the art school in Kumasi. Pedagogy has formed a very important part of my practice. Going back to school right after completing my first degree was one of the best decisions I have ever made. I was preoccupied with making sense of being an artist, that is, what to do and how to go about it. These were the earlier times I became a lot more conscious, maybe, about a certain direction to take for my work. Of course, I wasn’t so much aware of what to expect.
At art school our professor, kąrî΄ka.chä seid΄ou, continued to inspire as well as being critical: Do we really want to make art that just uses art history as a basis to reproduce the same frameworks that have existed?
Or do we want to somehow expand our imaginations to a point where we create experiences which might not really fit within a specific context or the global context, but expand the form that art can take?
Those questions really struck me (and still do) while sitting in his classes and that of other lecturers. I really pondered over what the role of art was going to be in the time we find ourselves in. I can undoubtedly say that those classes were really the key moments that shaped a lot of what I do. Of course, as an artist you always have your imagination, but this sense of motivation that sometimes comes in when you have mentors or people who somehow imagine that we as artists can do a lot more than we do. I took it upon myself and said, well, if I come from a place that didn’t really have art galleries or institutions, why can’t I somehow use my entire practice as a medium to somehow harness capital – being aware of its contradictions – and use it as a starting point to build these spaces and open up the discourse in a direction that we possibly couldn’t have imagined.
So, expanding our imagination is very important in your approach?
Yes, I think there is a lack of imagination across a generation. And I have always thought that this is one of the things that has led the world to the crisis that we have somehow inherited. I think that we can expand our imaginations to the point where we realise that maybe, oh, the world can be a lot easier than we have made it. We have made it a lot more complicated. Maybe if we just take our time, and somehow reorder things, we could re-imagine our place in the world. And not just us human beings, but our relationship to nature, ecology and the cosmos.
Can you explain this a bit more, maybe through one of your artworks?
Yeah, the silo (Nkrumah Voli) – [a massive, abandoned concrete grain silo in Tamale, Northern Ghana, that has been repurposed by Mahama] – is one of them. You know I was always interested in some of the historical sites that we had in the country. Spaces that I termed ‘impossible spaces.’ Spaces that were not built for human habitation, like these silos that were meant for storing grain. However, due to the fact that they were abandoned for many years, they house bats, livestock, snails, fishes and reptiles. And I thought, oh, how can I use the logic of the ghosts that are somehow embodied within this building as a way to expand the architecture that will in turn change how we think about the world inhabited with other life forms? Thus, in the act of acquiring the silo, of course, there is a contradiction of capital: the outcome from the sale of artworks to collections has been used to build the SCCA Tamale (Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art) and Red Clay Studios. I use SCCA Tamale and Red Clay and also money from selling works to institutions in the proposal to negotiate and convince the state to allow me to acquire the silo in order to expand on the notion of a silo and what it could offer.
I intend to convert the first floor into a greenhouse, and then develop the underground system so that the bats and reptiles can still live in it. There are plans to dig the ground to the level of the underground and bring in a train. The frame of the train without its interior will literally be buried. This is to be designed as an aquarium.
In combining different lifeforms and things that come from a very different age, we intend to stimulate curiosity and stretch imaginations. For instance, when a child goes into one of the airplanes at Red Clay and uses one of the cockpits as a classroom to study and navigate between that environment and let’s say, a VR headset to view the farming communities around. This experience, I believe, will shape his or her worldview. Burying a train underground, where you have an aquarium encased within it, and a child who is navigating the underground suddenly chances upon it, I think it is almost not worldly. We need to create these kinds of impossible spaces of imaginations.
Things we would never have thought of, or when we think about them, we might claim it’s not possible because it’s not going to result in anything, it’s not going to bring money, people are not going to earn money from it. I am not going to earn money from it but at least it’s worth it. Let me use this analogy, it’s like when a star implodes and becomes a black hole, or the beginning of the universe with the big bang with all these stars and heavenly bodies forming into galaxies.
So that is what I am trying to do with my practice, to create a condition that allows for an explosion of imagination in people’s minds towards social transformations.
And do people go there to see the silo?
It brings people there. Now that we have these spaces in Tamale, like Red Clay, there are people who travel outside their region to see it. It’s giving people more courage to go out. People are visiting the city, migrating between spaces where ordinarily they wouldn’t. We had a film screening at the end of the last year, one of the first film screenings at SCCA Tamale, when the space was under construction and before covid-19. We announced to the public: ‘Oh, we are going to have a film screening, come.’ And I thought there might be 10, 20 to 30 people. But I was surprised to see a thousand people who came in. People really crave for something in the world. A lot of these communities don’t even have electricity. When I went to establish this institute in this rural community, I had to pay the government institution responsible for making these connections to come and install the electricity there, even though it is their duty. The gesture to locate something which is not found in a place which already has an audience, but in a place with no pre-set audience, where people could get something out of it, it’s a commendable one. I think this is something we really have to learn for humanity’s future, in a way.
Is there a difference in showing your work in Ghana, in Africa, and outside, in Europe for example?
I think in the continent there is the opportunity to somehow create a new world experience with art and the kind of connections to draw to or from it. In working with western institutions, it is sometimes very difficult to propose radical or new ideas because of the history of exhibition and art making within a long tradition. It’s very difficult to propose ideas to western institutions. Sometimes these ideas get lost, because they have got so used to the modernist traditions, their traditional framework and ways of presenting art and ways of producing art. And there is always this element of spectacle around whatever you try to do. Sometimes, when I propose something maybe it wouldn’t work out because at the end of the day the spectacle was not needed. Also, you realise that some western institutions still want something that they can somehow own, or sometimes move.
Whereas for me at home we are interested in creating a system that somehow changes the way we think about the form of art itself. So, I think that is for me more promising, in a sense it reinforces an artist who wants to be a painter and wants to make, expand or radicalise painting. And that’s what I try to do as an artist, because I come from a painting background from my undergrad through to my PhD at the moment. The idea is: How can we further radicalise the foundation and concept of painting? How can we expand upon it? How can we expand our audience? How can we consider the fact that even when you produce a work, within a community, or let’s say, in a vacuum, in a void somewhere in the middle of nowhere, where there is no human being, how can you implicate nature or the surrounding, the bacterial life or enzymes? They are all implicated.
Human life is already implicated within your choice as an artist.
These are implied in some of the things we are trying to achieve.
Tell us about your installations and interventions at sensitive public locations, like the non-functional railway routes, the squatter premises, that show things that people don’t want to see, their mistakes.
I discovered some of these spaces early on, by going to these railways and seeing all this magic that existed there. I observed workers at work. Their processes involved inventing subtle ways to keep the machines running despite the constant uncertain conditions. It dawns on me: what and how, as an artist, can I contribute to a shift in the working relations in this space? But only as an artist, because I am not a government, I don’t have the funds, policy or anything. So, how can I appropriate the space to somehow create a work that can maybe shift the perspectives, or maybe make new perspectives, out of this context.
I would often collect material from these spaces for my research. Again, they are archives. Most of them had drawings and photographs of workers, who were working within these spaces, which were built in the 60s, the 20s, even as early as the late 19th century. These are important materials that people need to see in order to understand the history of work. There were these series of drawings that documented the entire history of the trains that were brought to Ghana through the colonial enterprise. And for me it was not just a critique of what happened. I am more interested in the promise of what it can become. Of course, we generally understand what has already happened in history, but how can we look beyond that history? If we take these trains, which could have been used for other occupations and now are no longer used, how can we inspire change within that?
I am interested in how we can expand the forms, or change the context, so that we can open a new sense of imagination, and maybe that imagination will physically affect the railway as something different in the future.
I am not aiming to do engineering work or saying we are going to save it. No, we are trying to create a condition that expands the imagination so that maybe a future generation can come back and see something different about what we are doing now.
Tell us about the materials that you use.
Material is very important to me, and I take quite some time to think about the form that it will take. Like the shoeboxes, I only showed it for the first time in 2017 but I had been working on it even before I started using the jute sacks, which was around 2011. And with the Parliament of Ghosts, it is a building now but it took a long time for me to understand what I wanted to do with the original idea.
There are materials you collect, sometimes for years, before you understand what they are because as an artist, you are proposing a new sense of aesthetics to the world, you want to be able to get it ‘right’ to the point. The same applies to the jute sacks. In the beginning, I was using it to wrap sculptures that I was producing when I was in art school. In my final-year undergraduate project in 2010, I proposed a wall of these sculptures but I didn’t have the financial means to realise it. But I always had the model with me at home and on my computer, and eventually, when I decided on the Non Orientable Nkansah seven years later, I realised that the idea of making an installation on a wall, which had stayed with me for years, was the right form. I borrowed that form and it worked so perfectly.
Sometimes I borrow just traditionally, like when you go to carpentry shops, the way nails, bolts and nuts, screws are arranged in these tiny I thought it could be really interesting if I somehow built shelves which seem to be decomposing and to have these boxes made up of the residues of the post-independence period with infrastructure and train parts that were discarded and also include archives to build the artwork. My practice or work comes from a century of aesthetics and it needs time.
Time is the single most precious commodity in the universe and we need that in order to make great or impactful work.
Your work is often related around architecture. What role does it play?
I am trying to navigate what architecture has to propose: the present, the past and the future of it. I think it’s exciting enough for me to use it as a tool or model for work.
Do you think getting the Prince Claus Award has an impact on your future plans?
Honestly, it means a whole lot particularly in these times we live in. Sometimes I ask myself the question: why? Why is it important to do these interventions within the social fabric? I know obviously the answers to that, but I believe it’s still important to ask. Over the last six-seven years I have literally invested every bit of money that I earn from my practice as an artist to build these spaces. And I was recently discussing with my assistant how much money we had spent making these projects and it’s ridiculous. Sometimes you turn to think and ask yourself is it really worth it, but you have to constantly remind yourself of the communities and future generations you are building these structures for and then comes this Award.
When the news of the Award came in, I was working on acquiring the silo, and it really gave me a sense that it is important to go on.
I am grateful to the community of artists in Ghana, particularly from the art faculty at KNUST Kumasi, they have been the greatest gift to my practice aside my family.
