Ibrahim Mahama

IM: When I was in art school, we had a professor named Karî’kachä Seid’ou, at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST). He was one of our biggest mentors in the art scene in Ghana, starting from Kumasi. He trained many of the other artists at the university.

The previous curriculum for artists was a British one, which was all about “the hand and the eye.” To tell you the truth, it was quite conservative in relation to teaching artists about what art is: how it’s produced, disseminated, distributed, and shown. Like many art schools around the world, I think the question of art, the point of why we do it, was missed. Instead, we were taught that we make art because, at the end of the day, we’re artists, we’re talented, and then we become famous or make money out of our work. But as for the real reason why art exists and why we make it…sometimes we don’t get to ask those questions.

So, this professor was interested in these questions and how we could use philosophy—whether Western, African, or universal—as a way to unearth these things. Before that, philosophy wasn’t really taught as part of the program, so he started introducing it. He was also very much interested in this idea of transforming art from a commodity into a gift and not necessarily thinking about your artwork from the point of view of “I’ve made an object.” Rather, he was thinking along the lines of producing something which becomes part of a larger system, something which ultimately interrogates the system. You might produce paintings or other things out of it, but the question is how is the system in which the thing is produced related to the people who are within that geographical system?

Most times, artists from the Global South don’t get to think too much about these questions for lack of capital, lack of resources, and lack of infrastructure. We know that is because of historical exploitation and all that. On the other hand, you’ll find all of that infrastructure in the Western hemisphere, with museums to support your practice. I’m an example of it. But at the end of the day, you might forget where you are making the work: the inspiration, and the conditions that gave rise to it to begin with. So, the work might just be shown in Europe or in America and be experienced by a Western audience. You never really get to think so much about the place the work is coming from. Sometimes we think, “Oh, the infrastructure is lacking, and the conditions there are not conducive to support the intelligence behind the work or in the work itself,” but we somehow forget that it’s those same conditions that inspired that work to begin with.

That’s where my work comes in. I’m very much interested in the complexities of all this and how the artist can transform all those conditions. Starting from the point of the gift—the precarious gift, the gift of the post-independence crisis, the gift of the colonial crisis—how can we use contemporary art to artistically transform that into something that shifts the way a different generation sees the world?

So, in building my studio, I wasn’t thinking about it as a space where I just make work. I was thinking of building it as a space where people come together to witness the production of work, to witness the artist at work, to witness different historical convergences, ideologies, and how things evolved. If you’re just making the work and putting it in an exhibition, it’s different from producing the work and inviting people to participate in the production, to witness how it’s being made. That’s what inspires the program at the studio and within our institutions.

You know, we spend a lot of time working with bus drivers, going to villages and communities, and bringing not only kids to see contemporary art, but also their parents. It’s an intergenerational thing, not just about the kids. We want to transform the future, and we know the kids are the key to the future, but who needs to guide them along the way? The parents. You can’t cut them off.

So for us, as much as we’re making work as a gift to a different generation—not just in terms of its materiality, but also its ideological premises—we also need their parents to somehow understand. They can push them and say, “It is okay to go to the artist’s studio. It is okay for you to study art. Or, it is okay if you want to be a scientist, but you don’t want to be a traditional scientist; you want to be experimental, and you want to fail in the process.”

You want the liberty to experiment and fail, because most societies don’t make room for failure. If you are in agriculture in Ghana, for instance, and you want to take a loan from a bank to experiment with new planting methods, the bank will say, “No, we want a yield; we want your crops to grow.” You then say, “Oh, but what I’m doing might open up a new way for farmers in the future to think about growing.” They will reply, “No, no, no. We're not interested.”

All these scenarios are part of the ideological premises I’m talking about. The idea that when we make art on these premises of failure, the gift, and everything else, we have the ability to transform the way an entire generation grows up and thinks culturally. So whether they become astronauts, bankers, pilots, or whatever, they are not living in a world where they expect everything to work and everything to succeed.

The world is pretty messed-up in the first place. We’re negotiating our way through it as we go. Even the Earth is not in a static position: it’s running through the solar system; the solar system is running through the galaxy; and the galaxy is running through the universe. Certainly, all these principles of order that are already established in the universe can guide us to rethink our position toward life as we know it.

IM: Yes, we currently have three. There is the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art (SCCA Tamale). Then we have Nkrumah Volini in Tamale, which is an old brutalist silo built by the Russians in the late fifties or early sixties. It was abandoned and never used for almost sixty years. I bought the building to transform it into a contemporary art space. Then we have my studio Red Clay, which houses The Parliament of Ghosts, which is the permanent collection of airplanes, trains, and all these other things.

But there are others I’m also working on. I’ve been working on one for quite a while that’s going to be called the Shea Community, or Shea House. It’s on land I bought that was meant for a shea plantation. The idea is to look at indigenous architecture and replicate it in an area that allows us to grow plants indigenous to the land. Spaces like these will allow us to process shea oil, experiment with it, and produce all kinds of other things out of it, rather than just products. Most people just want to produce a product they can sell, but we want to push the boundaries of it.

I like to think our institution is open even to animals and plants. Some of the installations we have in the space are like boxes and shelves. The last time we were doing a cleanup, we went to the very top and realized that the birds had made so many nests there. Imagine birds hatching eggs right out in the installation, and we didn’t even know! 

The goal is not art. Of course, art is the starting point, but we’re looking at every possible premise where we can use our understanding of art as a way to stretch its influence.

IM: To be honest, I think it’s both. We all need to be as global as we can be. But my point is that as we become more and more global, we also have to be more specific geographically.

Art is about the question of freedom and justice. Interestingly, in Ghana, our national motto is “Freedom and Justice.” After the 1948 riots, when ex-servicemen who fought for the British in the Second World War were killed while demanding their wages and our independence, a monument was built in honor of that service: the Independence Arch. It has Freedom and Justice written right on top of it. But I always tell myself that sometimes there is nothing free, just like the democracy we find ourselves in. Even when we look at it in a much larger sense. Take America, for example. If we’re talking about the freedom of mankind and life, then certainly walls and borders are contradictions to that.

For me, I’m thinking about distribution, because it’s not just about the process of making. Distribution is where art is truly born. It’s not so much that a thing is made; it’s about whether we have access and rights to that thing. That is the vital question we have to ask ourselves.

If you produce a work that talks about life, justice, and freedom, but it can only be seen by a tiny fraction of the world’s population, then, in principle, the work doesn’t do what it says it does. I try to get as literal as possible with that. That’s why I build these institutions: to make sure the work is physically here and is accessible.

Sometimes contradictions pop up within the work itself because it doesn’t function perfectly in certain places. It’s a struggle. We are asking these questions, pushing and pulling as we go along, but it’s better than sitting still and imagining the world is okay and everything will be fine. I don’t want to just say, “Oh, I’ve done the work and it can be viewed in New York. If you don’t get the chance to go to New York to see the show, that’s your problem.”

IM: There is a project I’ve been working on for a while that involves an old glass factory built in the post-independence era. It was constructed in the early sixties, completed in 1965, tested, and officially opened to the public in 1966 by our first president, Kwame Nkrumah. He was a socialist. He was very much aligned with countries in the Eastern Bloc. Even when there was democracy, there was a heavy focus on social programs. This factory was the biggest glass manufacturing plant in the whole of Sub-Saharan Africa. It operated in Ghana until the early 2000s, and then it was discontinued.

When we were growing up, every bottle you touched in Ghana—Fanta, Moscatel, Coca-Cola, Sprite, even the glass louvre blades meant for buildings—were all made in this factory. But the government decided not to reinvest in this massive space. They decided to sell it to a scrap company.

I buy a lot of objects from scrap dealers: trains; airplanes; things of significant historical value that the state only thinks of as commodities to sell for the price of iron. This factory was one of those. The raw iron was made in Germany, so they stripped everything. I negotiated with the company to buy part of the factory to produce something entirely new out of it.

The building was part of the post-independence story of industrialization. Nkrumah built the Akosombo Dam in order to power all these factories. But when Nkrumah was overthrown, Ghana was steeped in a long history of military coups that led to multiple failures. Now we have the opportunity to look at these forms and think about what we can do with them, given the fact that they are no longer performing the roles they were meant to do.

And art is the perfect medium for this. You can take something that has totally lost its industrial or production value and give it a different aesthetic or philosophical value, which then accrues another value altogether. I decided to collect as many different materials from this factory as possible: parts of the buildings; the molds for making the glass; the abandoned glass itself; even the dust. I collected the dust in the factory because I imagined there were all these ghosts of potential and failures inside it.

The most interesting thing was that a lot of the glass produced there was never used. It just sat there. There is a history of potential in it, because you never know what it could have become. But since it was never used, those ghosts and potentialities become the operations embedded within it. The dust, for me, was a physical sign of the ghost residing in this place.

All of this stemmed from failure. None of this should be possible, but the history of failure allowed these philosophical points of interest to be produced. Whether we choose to see it or not is the question, and I think that’s where the role of the artist comes in. Artists are like shamans in a sense; we are supposed to see what everyone else does not see.

That is why the shift in philosophy in our art education was so important. The previous academic model taught artists just to produce what they saw. If you saw a market scene, you just reproduced it and made it as beautiful as possible so someone would acquire it. For us, it’s not about beauty; it’s about the sublime and sometimes it’s about the grotesque.

If you look at art history, you find academy artists who made very flattering paintings, but you also find artists who showed the world for what it truly was. Gustav Courbet is a good example of that after the French Revolution. These are very important historical reflections, and as an artist, I feel we have to learn from them and use them to inspire what we make.

IM: It’s a very good question. Honestly, I always say that the materials I use are not found randomly at all, because I go through a lot of trouble to get them. Sometimes it takes six years. With the trains, it took ten years before I could even acquire the first one.

A train is not a found object. An airplane is not a found object, either. By the time we negotiate and buy them, you have to work with engineers to dismantle them, put them on a truck, and transport them. From where I collect these things to my studio, it’s easily a 600-kilometer drive, and there is so much expense later in reassembling all of those things. So they’re certainly not found.

But the jute bags were not objects that I just found. Of course, you could find pieces here and there in the market, but in order to produce the kind of installations I wanted, I had to negotiate. I had to go to the market, speak to the women, and buy new bags for them in exchange for their old bags. Every bag you see in my work is representative of a new bag that is now with those women.

You are contributing, again, to their livelihood. But you also have to understand that their livelihood—them using the bags every day to transport a commodity from one market to another, cutting them, re-stitching them—is the intelligence embedded in the aesthetics you saw as an artist. You think, “Oh, this is very beautiful. This is so interesting. How did this material get to look like this?” Then you realize there’s a million of them out there. You see how these historical conditions produced this, and you, as an artist, say, “Okay, fine. I’m going to buy these materials, give them to these people, take the old ones, and stitch them together.” Or, “Let me work with the women to stitch it together.” Politically, it opens up questions within the production process itself. 

Then you wrap a building with these bags. By the time I wrap a building, it seems like, “Oh, the artist is a genius, he did this and that.” But I like to go back to the beginning and think about all the different points that allowed for this to be produced. That is where my interest resides.

IM: I don’t know, honestly, if you ask me. All I know, given the local context we’re working with, is that when another generation asks different questions based on historical examples, it’s very important that those artworks will be within their reach.

We know that within the next fifty years, nearly one out of two young people in the world are going to be African and Black. Since the African continent is growing so fast, and the legacy of our work is meant to pose questions within those spaces, it won’t be achieving our goal if the object itself is unreachable, locked within a certain economy that they cannot access.

The question of reach is still something the world struggles with. The body might be stuck in one place while things move around. Humankind hasn’t yet gotten to that level of thinking about us as one entity, as a planet. We’re still thinking about individual nation-states, protecting limited resources, and waging wars to get more things. We haven’t really grown much.

Nonetheless, within the next fifty to hundred years, while those conversations are happening, it is vital that these objects are within reach of the people in those timelines. If brilliant young curators want to do a show and use the work of an artist from my timeline as a starting point, but they can't access it, then we are already setting ourselves up for failure in the future. Our job is only to use the failures of our time to create potential.

So, although I say we need to be open to failure, we don’t aim to create systematic failure in the future. That’s always been one thing I’ve fought against: systematic failure. That is what has produced our conditions in the Global South, even in the post-independence era, due to neocolonial structures and globalization. “Oh, let’s allow companies to decide whatever they want to do. Let them be autonomous; we shouldn’t interfere too much.” Of course, at the end of the day, that leads to exploitation and civil wars around the world. It’s something we have to keep asking ourselves.

IM: I know where you’re going with this, but for me, the kind of work that I do is not very market-oriented compared with that of some of my colleagues. I understand that I need to be able to live off the work that I produce, but that’s not the main reason why I make it. I want to be able to make work that is genuine, that is honest, and that opens up all these other potentials for art practice itself and ways of thinking about art and our positions within it. So if I make a lot of different installations, and maybe in a year I sell one or two works that allow me to live and continue doing my experiments, that’s good enough for me.

If younger artists or people within society are looking at you, it’s important that there should be something very transparent about what you do and what it means to them and their own position within these spaces. I don’t think it’s appropriate to pretend the world is such a great place. The world is a struggling place. There are so many problems that people are dealing with all around the world, and particularly within the regions we come from.

When I go home, a lot of people meet me, and they’re very proud of me. Within the local context, in the markets, at the airports, everywhere I go, people know me. They always say to me, “Oh, what you do is really amazing. Sometimes we don’t really understand why you do what you do, but I brought my children to your studio the other day, and they had a really good time. We were there for three or four hours. We had a picnic, and we didn’t have to pay a dime for it.”

You open up a new way of seeing the world for their children, and for them—that’s very important. So when they see you traveling in a global context, going to Paris, London, Japan—wherever—and then you come back home, the relationship between the image they see of you out there and the image of you at home is parallel. It synchronizes. That is very important, because then all these young people growing up there realize that, yes, indeed, we can be out there in the world, but we can also be grounded here. We don’t need to move to the U.S.

Even if we become successful and move in the world, it doesn’t mean our relationship to the local community must change. It only has to reinforce our belief in where we come from, because there are still a lot of people who cannot escape this reality. It’s important that the work we do transforms their perception and gives them more faith and more hope about the world they live in.

IM: I don’t know. I think it’s all of us. Me, the work itself, the community, people globally like yourself and many others. I think we all do. And sometimes, the idea of time is non-existent, or it just stops in itself.

For me, time is very important in what we do not in a linear fashion, but just time as it is. Whether it allows us to move between the timelines we know—past, present, or future—or a different kind of time altogether: a time which is illogical, a time which doesn’t make any sense.

I watch a lot of movies that have to do with questions of time and reality, like science fiction, just to have a bit of inspiration regarding going beyond the confines of our realities. I think a lot of these objects we work with embody this question of time that we’re still struggling to understand. In the making of art, we have glimpses into it, whether we understand it totally or not.