Rough pieces of burlap hang between the Fondation Cartier's 19th-century arches, facing the historic Place du Palais Royal. The humble fabric comes from sacks produced in India or Bangladesh, then used to transport cocoa from Ghana to Europe. In the hands of Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama, these tattered workhorse bags are now works of art, heavy with meaning and memory.
For the second major exhibition in its vast new Jean Nouvel-designed space, the Fondation Cartier chose Mahama and nine associated artists and collectives to inhabit the entire museum with a show called 'The Harvest Season'. Mahama's monumental installations, textiles and collages are a perfect fit for the museum's generous volumes and intersecting perspectives.
Born in 1987 in Tamale, northern Ghana, Mahama studied art close to home, at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST). He burst onto the international scene by draping the Arsenale in burlap sacks at the 2015 Venice Biennale, and he has steadily gained in stature ever since. (We’ve previously explored his works at London’s White Cube and seen him turn the Barbican pink.)
Mahama's art is social and political, interwoven with the history of Ghana, from colonialism to the euphoria of independence and the early promise of democracy that ended suddenly with a coup d'état in 1966. Exhibition curator Aby Gaye-Duparc says, 'One of the questions Ibrahim Mahama's work asks, and that underlies this exhibition, is: what remains of these utopias conceived at the time of African independence, in the late 1950s and early 1960s? What legacies have endured? What failures? And how do we build the future from that utopia?'
The artist has reinvested the significant earnings from sales of his work into community and educational projects in Ghana, building three art centres in Tamale where artists, schoolkids or anyone else is invited to explore, experiment and create. At one of them, Red Clay, the property contains old trains that once operated around the country's manganese and bauxite mines. He acquired them as archives, to be recycled from memory-imbibed industrial objects into works of art. 'I've always believed that when an artist produces an object, the object is not just reliant on the so-called intellectual value of the artist, because there are so many people who touch these objects, who use them.'
At the Fondation Cartier, the show includes Mahama's evocative installation Parliament of Ghosts. A parliamentary chamber of empty chairs, it is a metaphor for the democratic experiment cut short. Each time the artist shows this work, he changes it; here, he has used wooden stools from Ghana's Asante Empire, which was forcibly annexed by the British in 1902.
‘What does it mean to be able to harvest the potentials that were in the past?’
Ibrahim Mahama
Things Fall Apart is a brand new installation. While Mahama was preparing for this show, he learned that the Aboso Glass Factory in southern Ghana was about to be scrapped. President Nkrumah had opened the bottle-manufacturing plant in 1966, just weeks before he was deposed. 'I thought, wouldn't it be interesting if we used the capital that was coming from the Fondation Cartier to acquire this factory, and then rebuild a section of it here in Paris, but also rebuild it in the studio in Tamale as a new public space that allows us to be able to reflect on these histories? So we did. That's where the question of the harvest came from. What does it mean to be able to harvest the potentials that were in the past, but somehow stayed there and never travelled to the future?’
The installation is massive, consisting of the factory's original sign and metal structure, surrounded on either side with 1,000 stacked wooden crates and over 25,000 green glass bottles. Mahama admits it was insanely difficult to purchase the factory, dismantle it, then move a chunk of it to France to be rebuilt. 'It took two years to conceive and make the forms possible. But I thought that was the most interesting thing, because it would introduce a new audience to a very different position in terms of what art from the continent has to offer.'
The exhibition reveals the breadth of Mahama's practice. It includes collages where he covered archival factory orders with charcoal drawings of African labourers carrying steel rails to build colonial railroads. Photographs of women's arms tattooed with their names, serving as a means of identification when they travelled. Immense mixed-media textiles.
It was one of Mahama's university professors, Dorothy Akpene Amenuke, who inspired his work with burlap, and he's invited her to exhibit her textile installations here, such as the immersive, velvety red weaving called Gli, which means ‘wall’. 'Ibrahim is exceptional,' she says. 'Wherever he finds himself, whatever brought him there, he always acknowledges that he didn't come this far by himself.'
Passersby looking through the large windows of the Fondation Cartier will see screenprinted textiles by the young German-Ghanaian artist Zohra Opoku, examining her heritage as the daughter of a village chief whom she met for the first time at age 27, shortly before he died.
Another invited artist is 97-year-old James Barnor, who witnessed Ghana's liberation as the country's first photojournalist. Two years ago, Mahama paid tribute to Barnor by reconstructing his 1950s portrait studio in Accra, Ever Young, at Red Clay. He set up a large-format Polaroid 20x24 Instant Land Camera and, together with Barnor, shot portraits of the locals. The delightful results are on show here, along with Barnor's earlier work.
Mahama went to art school with the painter Gideon Appah, who is successful in his own right. The Fondation Cartier made the choice to display some of his colourful figurative paintings alongside loans from the Musée d'Orsay, underlining his art history references. At the same time, Appah works with a local vernacular – Black surfers, Accra's once-beloved Roxy cinema, men in suits having a smoke. 'I made paintings that referenced things that were happening in the 1970s, from old newspapers referencing the coolness, you know, of Ghanaian culture way back then.'
Other exhibitors have come from different backgrounds or countries – Slovenia, Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo – but all share a connection to Mahama. The CATPC, or Congolese Plantation Workers Art League, is a collective of plantation workers/artists using the proceeds from their artworks to buy back land confiscated in 1911 by the brothers who built Unilever and used forced labour to harvest palm oil. One of their sculptures, cast in a highly symbolic mixture of cacao, sugar, salt and palm oil, portrays an art collector riding a bull, meant to represent the Western museums that have pillaged African art. When asked how they feel to be participating in an exhibition in France, Ced'art Tamasala says, 'This is different, because we have chosen to put our works in Western museums that were supported by forced labour. We are coming to take back a bit of the strength, to bring it back to the plantation where everything came from.'
‘The Harvest Season’ opened in Paris in the midst of social upheaval. Was it the perfect timing for Mahama's message of building a better future? 'It's always the time,' he says, 'because the world has been in crisis for far too long, and artists can have a very important role to play. Sometimes, certain artists are able to accumulate certain powers within the art world that allow them to take more responsibility, where ordinarily an artist would not be able. And when that happens, you have to acknowledge it and do it rightfully as it's supposed to be.'
Ibrahim Mahama at Fondation Cartier until 28 February 2027