Ibrahim Mahama

Ibrahim Mahama (born 1987 in Ghana), a multidisciplinary artist among the most influential of his generation, gained international renown with his installations made from discarded materials, archives, and recovered fragments of industrial elements that he uses for new creations. For the Fondation Cartier, he has imagined a living entity that resonates with the dynamics of the art centres that he has founded since 2019 in Tamale, northern Ghana. The Harvest Season evokes the patient cycle of creation: sewing ideas, passing on knowledge, harvesting the fruit of collective work. Ibrahim Mahama will occupy all of the new space, Place du Palais-Royal, with site-specific works, along with previously unseen versions of a selection of his most emblematic installations.

Ibrahim Mahama's work explores Ghana's colonial and postcolonial legacies through contemporary issues of work, degrowth, the circulation of goods and restitution. In Tamale, the artist works with local people to create his installations and bring to life his art centres, where education occupies a central position. These centres actively participate in the emergence of a network of independent cultural institutions on the African continent, demonstrating the transformative power of art and cultural investment in fragile territories.

In line with his collaborative artistic practice, Ibrahim Mahama has called upon nine artists and artist collectives to participate in the exhibition. Ghanaian photographer James Barnor, who witnessed the first years of independence and founded the Ever Young photographic studio in Accra, worked with Mahama in 2024 to recreate his iconic Ever Young studio in Tamale. Dorothy Akpene Amenuke, the first woman to teach at the illustrious Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Ghana, was Mahama's teacher. Since the 2000s, she has been using jute sacks in her works. Painter Gideon Appah studied at KNUST at the same time as Mahama. He used archive images from Ghana's Independence to create a pictorial corpus of works anchored in historical reality but also akin to dreams. Architect Courage Dzidula Kpodo, with the collective Postbox Ghana, share with Mahama an interest in the archives of the new independent Ghanaian nation that saw the light of day at the end of the 1950s. Zohra Opoku was born in East Germany to a Ghanaian father. Now living and working in Accra, she has been developing a body of work using screen prints on recycled fabrics, in which she questions her own identity and her bicultural heritage. The Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs des Plantations Congolaises (CATPC), based in Lusanga (DRC), uses art as a means of liberation. In 2022, Mahama covered their art centre, “White Cube Lusanga”, with jute cacao sacks. Slovene artist Tjaša Rener's work is closely linked to the relationship that she has developed with Ghana. Individual narratives shed light on diplomatic relations between Ghana under its first president, Kwame Nkrumah, dismissed in 1966, and Josip Boz Tito's Yugoslavia within the Non-Aligned Movement. The installation by Franco-Afghan artist and architect Feda Wardak echoes Mahama's concerns about their countries' industrial infrastructures and the extractivism imposed by former colonial powers.

Aby Gaye (Ibrahim Mahama) 
Jeanne Barral (Invited artists) 
Chiara Agradi (James Barnor)