Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama wins XXIII Pino Pascali Prize.

Ghanaian Ibrahim Mahama (Tamale, 1987) is the winner of the XXIII Pino Pascali Prize, awarded annually by the Fondazione Pino Pascali. The Prize Committee, chaired by Rosalba Branà director of the Fondazione Pino Pascali, Adrienne Drake, director of the Fondazione Giuliani for contemporary art in Rome, and Nicola Zito, art historian and curator of the Fondazione Pino Pascali, gave the following reasons for the choice: “Ibrahim Mahama, a Ghanaian artist who has been a protagonist on the international scene for several years, reflects on the human condition, nomadism, migration, and the exploitation of man. An artist with a strong political connotation, Mahama contaminates the languages of art, from site-specific environmental installation to photography and object assemblage, with the intention of leading the viewer to reflect on what are the failures of modernity.”

Mahama, who was born in 1987 in Tamale, a regional capital in northern Ghana with a half-million inhabitants, where he currently lives and works, also recently received the 2020 Prince Claus Award in Amsterdam, an award that recognizes those who have most distinguished themselves in the application of culture to social development. He studied painting and sculpture at Kwame Nkurumah University in Kumasi until 2013, when he graduated. During his university years he initiated a series of interventions and activities reflecting on the theme of globalization, labor, and the movement of goods, with works also created through collaborations with Ghanaian citizens. In 2019, the artist opened the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art (SCCA), a museum space run by a group of artists and curators active in Ghana, followed by the opening of a vast studio complex, Red Clay, in nearby Janna Kpenn in September 2020. Comprising exhibition spaces, research facilities, and an artist residency center, both sites represent Mahama’s contribution to the development and expansion of the contemporary art scene in his country.

Mahama’s work has been included in a number of international exhibitions including NIRIN, 22nd Biennale of Sydney (2020); Tomorrow There Will Be More of Us, Stellenbosch Triennial (2020); Living Grains, Fondazione Giuliani, Rome (2019); Future Genealogies, Tales From The Equatorial Line, 6th Biennale of Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of the Congo (2019); Parliament of Ghosts, The Whitworth, The University of Manchester (2019); Labor of Many, Norval Foundation, Cape Town (2019); Documenta 14, Athens and Kassel (2017); An Age of Our Own Making, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen and Holbæk (2016); Fracture, Tel Aviv Art Museum, Israel (2016); Artist’s Rooms, K21, Düsseldorf (2015); Material Effects, The Broad Art Museum, Michigan (2015). Mahama has also participated in two editions of the Venice Biennale, in 2019, May You Live in Interesting Times, at the inaugural Ghana Pavilion, and in 2015, All the World’s Future, in which he presented the large site-specific installation Out of Bounds, made from burlap sacks at the Tronchetto in the Arsenale.

In his artistic practice, Mahama takes on the jute sack, a recurring object in his works, as a symbol and metaphor for a fragile economy, based on cocoa production: stamped, torn, patched, it becomes for Mahama an amplifier of stories, telling about the people who worked on it, among ports, warehouses, markets and cities.

The sack becomes a layering of memories, people, objects, places and architecture, the reference leads to the problems of the African continent to its migration processes, to the complex dynamics of globalization. Manufactured in Southeast Asia, the sacks are imported by Ghana Cocoa Boards to transport cocoa beans, considered luxury products. After this first use, the sacks are repurposed for many more times to transport products such as rice, millet, maize, and charcoal. Mahama buys them at the end of their working life, stitching them together to create huge tapestries that he also uses to conceal monumental and iconic buildings of consumer society, as in some well-known recent installations, including in Italy.

As part of his research on the brutalist architecture of post-colonial Ghana, Ibrahim Mahama has embarked on a journey of analysis and renovation that begins with one such building, renamed “Nkrumah Voli-ni,” which became home to a colony of bats during the decades of neglect that followed the 1966 military coup; after buying it, the artist, in the process of converting and renovating the building, let the bats continue to live there. These animals are the protagonists of the collages produced by Mahama, becoming the symbol of adaptability and the creation of new spaces and ecosystems.

Mahama’s works now go on display at the Fondazione Pascali in Polignano a Mare, where a site-specific project will be presented in the museum’s central hall. Also on display are the previously unseen works Sunbun and Tinambanyi (2020-2021). Again, Lazarus, a site-specific intervention in Exchiesetta, under the coordination of the artist, will be realized during a workshop led by Angela Varvara, professor of Scenography at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bari. The production was assisted by the cultural enterprise Cultour Società Benefit, which also provided two scholarships worth 500 euros for students Giulia Tota and Filomena Pucci who will work on the project. For the installation created at the Exchiesetta, Mahama adopts materials related to production and trade, such as metal rods and waxed canvas, used to cover goods during international transportation and impregnated with oil due to continuous contact with mechanical parts. The artist thus exposes the “paradox” that features these animals, which have always been seen as dangerous beings for humans, but in reality, like so many other species, victims (so much so that they are forced to recreate their environment in an abandoned silo) of contemporary man, obsessed with production and the accumulation of capital.

“I’m interested,” Mahama explains, “in looking at the artistic and political implications of these materials. What happens when you collect different objects from places with specific histories and memories and put them together to form a new object? I am interested in how crisis and failure are absorbed into this material with a strong reference to the global transaction and the way capitalist structures work. (...) the hope is that their remnants - stained, broken and abandoned, yet light-bearing - can lead us to new possibilities and spaces beyond.”

The exhibition, open from December 11, 2021 to March 13, 2022, is in collaboration with APALAZZO Gallery in Brescia, which represents the artist in Italy. In the prize’s roll of honor, Ibrahim Mahama succeeds Zhang Huan (2020), Fabio Sargentini (2019), Hans op de Beeck (2017), Christiane Löhr (2016), AES+F (2015), Fabrizio Plessi (2014), Matt Collishaw (2013), Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg (2012), Bertozzi & Casoni (2011), Jake & Dinos Chapman (2010), Jan Fabre (2008), Adrian Paci (2007), Lidia Abdul (2006), Studio Azzurro (2005), Marco Giusti (2003), Giovanni Albanese (2002), and Achille Bonito Oliva (1997).

Image: Ibrahim Mahama, Nkrumah Voli-ni, Installation View (detail). Photo by Marino Colucci

Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama wins XXIII Pino Pascali Prize.

Warning: the translation into English of the original Italian article was created using automatic tools. We undertake to review all articles, but we do not guarantee the total absence of inaccuracies in the translation due to the program. You can find the original by clicking on the ITA button. If you find any mistake,please contact us.