Listen to Ibrahim Mahama speak, and he’s likely to credit his success to his community, which includes market women, weavers, craftsmen, studio assistants, railway workers, curators, professors, and fellow artists.
The Ghanaian artist is quick to recognize their contributions when he receives one of the many awards he’s picked up recently. Ranked at the top of the influential ArtReview Power 100 list in 2025, he also won an Art Basel Gold Award that year and received the 2026 Arnold Bode prize. He was also recently named a chevalier of the French government’s Ordre des Arts et des Lettres; the honor was bestowed upon him in Ghana by Diarra Dime Labille, France’s Ambassador to the West African country.
“We live and work in a community and nobody is an island by themselves. I built my practice based on the idea of collectivity and working with different collaborators,” Mahama explained in an interview with ARTnews. As an example, he cited the scornful and at times suspicious reactions of Mallam Atta market women in Accra when he started collecting worn-out jute sacks at the early stage of his career, especially because he was still in college when he began producing those works. (The works he produced using those sacks quickly gained him fame, with some memorably appearing in Okwui Enwezor’s Venice Biennale in 2015.) As he spent time with the market women, they came to understand what he was doing and continued supporting him, helping him collect the sacks that still recur in his art.
“I think the artist is just a vessel, and I see myself as that vessel in order to put all these different things together to do the work that we do,” he added.
Mahama has become one of the most internationally visible Ghanaian artists, showing his work at biennials and museums across the world, and directing his success back to Ghana: The money from the sales of Mahama’s work is directed toward building institutions that he founds, including the Tamale-based Red Clay Studio and the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art. He’s also bought dilapidated or abandoned buildings, factories, and airplanes, and turned them into art and educational spaces, as he did with Nkrumah Voli-ni, also in Tamale.
These projects, which Mahama called a “lifetime work,” breathe new life into collected materials, archives, industrial and national heritage. His work at times extends beyond Ghana to include international like with people like the Kenyan British artist Michael Armitage and his Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute. Learning from those conversations and becoming part of a large community expands the scope of what is possible is Mahama’s practice.
On Thursday, Mahama will open yet another epic project: “The Harvest Season,” an exhibition at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris, whose entire building he will take over starting next week. The show is “the most ambitious exhibition I’ve done,” Mahama said.
Parliament of Ghosts, an ongoing installation made of discarded train seats, railway sleepers, school furniture, worn-out jute sacks, and government archives that premiered in 2019 will figure in the Fondation Cartier show in a new iteration that adds about 200 collected and restored royal stools from the Asante Empire.
The idea, Mahama said, is to highlight a contradiction: These same stools, which are often looted before being exhibited in Western museums, are at times placed in glass cases. At the Fondation Cartier, people will have free access to them. He hopes this will invert questions around the return of African objects from Europe, asking: What happens when these stools are brought from Ghana to Europe as “living” objects and utilized for their original purpose, and not in museum cases or glasses? Doing so brings out the “the ghosts [and] histories” of these stools, creating an avenue for different conversations, he added.
There’s also a new project created by Mahama for this exhibition centered on the Aboso Glass Factory, which was established in 1966 by Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, as part of the country’s industrialization efforts, before he was overthrown in a coup in that same year. Titled Things Fall Apart, after the 1958 novel by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, it is a reconstruction of the abandoned glass bottle manufacturing plant that Mahama purchased some two years ago with production funds from Fondation Cartier.
The Paris installation is only a small part of the project, however, since the glass factory is being rebuilt in spaces including Red Clay Studio in Tamale and a British-era colonial building. When the Fondation Cartier exhibition ends, the factory will be returned to Ghana for permanent installation in Kumasi, where Mahama plans to build a new institution. He is also working with cinema owners and local craftsmen to explore the possibility of rebuilding some abandoned cinemas in the country.
In addition, a collection of works on the Ghanaian railway system will also be on display in the exhibition. A new textile installation using Ghanaian fabrics produced in northern Ghana, truck inner tubes, jute sacks, and found textiles will be hung across the arcades on the facades of the Fondation Cartier building.
“There is a dialogue between this old building [constructed in the 1850s] and Ibrahim’s work, which addresses the history of the 19th century in Ghana, and the links between what was happening between Europe and West Africa at that time,” said Aby Gaye-Duparc, the curator of the exhibition.
“What we really want to convey to the audience is that there are two sides of [Mahama]’s artistic practice,” said Gaye-Duparc. “There’s work that we see: installations, videos, work on paper. Everything comes from this community in Tamale that he has built because a lot of the installations were made first in Tamale and then travel to Paris or other venues.”
The other part, Gaye-Duparc continued, “is the work behind it that is being built in Tamale,” referring to the artist’s building of artistic infrastructure and institutions in the Northern Ghana city. These structures, she added, have expanded access to the arts for people who were left out for various reasons.
In line with Mahama’s collaborative approach, the Paris exhibition will also feature work by artists and collectives including James Barnor, Gideon Appah, CATPC (Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise), Tjaša Rener, Postbox Ghana, Courage Dzidula Kpodo, and Dorothy Akpene Amenuke, Mahama’s mentor.
Kpodo, an architect, will exhibit work that addresses modernism, turning the focus away from tropical modernism centered on concrete buildings, which were often built by foreigners in Ghanaian cities. The central piece will be a wall reconstruction made out of laterite from a building he owns in Gyampo, in the Eastern Region, used in so-called vernacular or traditional buildings. The installation will include about 100 postcards by the Postbox Ghana collective depicting tropical modernist architectural buildings in cities such as Accra, Kumasi and Takoradi.
“I would describe Ibrahim as someone who makes space within his own abilities and means for people that he thinks are doing interesting, important work,” said Kpodo.
The Fondation Cartier exhibition is one of the first major ones by Mahama staged since he was viciously attacked earlier this year by a special operations unit of the Ghana Police Service in Tamale, where he lives and works. Mahama noted the community support that he received during the fallout, saying, “It was fantastic, I must say. I was really overwhelmed, because sometimes you don’t realize how much your work means to people.” He added that people traveled from within Tamale and from other cities like Accra and Kumasi came to visit him, express regret, and bemoan the treatment meted out to him by the police, especially because of his considerable contributions to the city.
He said he was unaware of the current state of the investigations into the matter by the Criminal Investigation Department as directed by Ghana’s Inspector General of Police because he hadn’t received updates in months. But he also seemed more interested in concentrating on his art. “I want to channel my energy into this positive part of my practice of what I do and what it means to the community,” he explained. “But certainly, I am also quite disappointed in the way that it was handled by the police. And I hope that at some point, we will be able to at least know more [about the investigations], so that we see what direction to take it in.” He plans to follow up again when he settles back in Ghana by the end of the year from his travels.
For now, he is more focused on supporting the community he has helped create. “I’m happy that the work I do has a very profound meaning and effect on people who live on our continent, in particular Ghana. I am also interested in how this work is traveling around the world, stretching the African sensibilities, and what we are bringing to art in the 21st century.”