Milan, Porta Venezia's neoclassical toll booths packed by Ibrahim Mahama with jute sacks

From Tuesday, April 2 to Sunday, April 14, 2019, Fondazione Nicola Trussardi presents A Friend, a massive installation conceived specifically for the two neoclassical Porta Venezia toll booths by Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama (Tamale, Ghana, 1987), curated by Massimiliano Gioni. The installation is created on the occasion of MilanArt Week, coordinated by the City of Milan, and will remain on view for the entire duration of Design Week.

After his major interventions within important international contemporary art festivals, from the 56. International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale (2015) to Documenta 14 (2017) in Kassel and Athens, the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi has invited Mahama to create an urban-scale installation in Milan that will entirely involve a symbolic place of the city: the crossroads of Porta Venezia, one of the six main gates of the urban belt, which stands on the same road axis on which the gates of the same name from the Roman, medieval and Spanish periods had previously risen. For centuries, Porta Venezia was the gateway to the East for Milan, marking the boundary that delimited the urban territory from the countryside, a place that historically helped define the topography of Milan and the relationship between the city and the outside world, recurring as much in life as in chronicles: from the entry of the plague that ravaged the city with the 17th-century epidemic, through descriptions in the pages of I Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed), to the multi-ethnic neighborhoods that today are articulated around this fundamental junction. A Friend aims to trigger a reflection on the very concept of the threshold, that place of passage that defines inside and outside, self and other, friend and foe.

As has already happened with the numerous public works created by Ibrahim Mahama in contemporary art capitals in museums, libraries, government buildings, theaters and train stations, in Milan the artist will also wrap the neoclassical toll booths of Porta Venezia with jute sacks, creating a second skin that will give the two buildings a new identity, leading us to look at them no longer as mere monuments, but in light of their historical origin and their symbolic and economic function as a place of commercial exchange. Addressing all the people who daily inhabit and frequent the city, Mahama will stage at a neuralgic junction for the city’s road system a temporary spectacle capable of confronting Milan’s past and present. In this Milanese presentation, Mahama’s work also seems to relate explicitly to the urban interventions of artist Christo, who in the 1970s packed the monuments to Leonardo da Vinci and Vittorio Emanuele in Piazza Scala and Piazza Duomo. If in those years the actions of
hristo seemed to criticize the consumer world, today Mahama’s “civil demonstrations,” as the artist describes them, tell of a far more complex world of global tensions.

Through research and transformation of materials, the young Mahama investigates some of the most important contemporary issues: migration, globalization, and the movement of goods and people across borders and nations. His large-scale installations employ materials gathered from urban environments, such as architectural fragments, wood, textiles and, in particular, jute sacks that are sewn together and draped over imposing architectural structures. Just as the American sacks used for the distribution of Marshall Plan food aid in Europe were probably the basis of Alberto Burri’s inspiration, so Mahama’s sacks are fundamental elements of his research: symbolic of Ghanaian markets, they are made in Asia and imported to Africa for the international-scale transport of food and various goods (cocoa, beans, rice, but also coal).

Ripped, patched and marked with various marks and coordinates, the sacks with their dramatic, tattered stitching become gauze that patches the wounds of history, symbolic of conflicts and dramas that have been consumed for centuries in the shadow of the global economy. At the same time, Mahama’s sacks encapsulate a more hidden meaning concerning the labor force behind the international movement of goods. The jute sack, the artist explains, “tells of the hands that lifted it, as well as the products it carried, between ports, warehouses, markets and cities. The conditions of the people remain imprisoned in it. And the same happens to the places he travels through.” To assemble the bags, Mahama often collaborates with dozens of migrants from urban and rural areas looking for work, without papers or rights, victims of a nomadic and uncertain existence that resembles the conditions suffered by the objects used in his works.

Born in 1987 in Temale, Ghana, Ibrahim Mahama lives and works between Accra, Temale and Kumasi, Ghana. After graduating in Painting and Sculpture from Kuame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (Kumasi, Ghana), Mahama exhibited his work in some of the most important international contemporary art exhibitions, including the 56. International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale (2015) and Documenta 14 (2017). He was chosen among the artists who will represent Ghana at the next Venice Biennale (2019). His works have also been included in numerous group exhibitions, in major international institutions, galleries and fairs, including: Savvy Contemporary, Berlin (2018); White Cube, London (2018); Art Basel Unlimited, Basel (2018); La Biennale de l’Art africain contemporain: DAK’ART, Dakar (2018); Future Generation Art Prize, Venice (2017); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2017); Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2016); Tel Aviv Museum of Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv (2016); Eli and Edythe Broad Museum, Michigan, USA (2015); Apalazzogallery, Brescia (2015); Saatchi Gallery, London (2015; 2014).

For all information you can visit the official website of the Foundation.

Pictured: Ibrahim Mahama, Check Point Sekondi Loco. 1901-2030 (2016-2017; documenta 14, Kassel, installation view). Courtesy of Ibrahim Mahama and Apalazzogallery.

Source: release

Milan, Porta Venezia's neoclassical toll booths packed by Ibrahim Mahama with jute sacks

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