Artist · Ghana
Ibrahim Mahama
Ibrahim Mahama (born 1987) is a Ghanaian artist who covers buildings, monuments and gallery walls with vast patchworks of used jute sacks — the sacks in which cocoa, coffee, rice and charcoal travel through Ghana's markets and ports. His work turns materials of trade and labour into monuments to global commerce and its histories. In his home city of Tamale he has founded the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art and other spaces for artists and the public.
Updated 3 min read
The sacks
Ibrahim Mahama was born in Tamale, in northern Ghana, in 1987, and studied painting and sculpture at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi. While still a student he began working with jute sacks: the coarse bags, made in Asia and imported to Ghana to carry cocoa beans for export, that are reused until they fall apart to carry charcoal, grain and goods in the markets.
He buys the worn sacks from traders, often keeping their stencilled names and numbers, and has teams of workers stitch them into enormous sheets. Hung over the façades of buildings, theatres, stadiums and train stations, they transform them — and make visible the labour, trade and inequality bound up in the material. Each sack carries the traces of the hands and journeys it has known.
How to look at the work
Up close, a work by Mahama is a record rather than a surface. Read the printing: the Ghana Cocoa Board's stamps declaring a product of Ghana, on sacks woven in South-East Asia, and the names and numbers that traders added later. Notice the patches and mended tears that show how long each sack stayed in use. Then step back: the same humble, worn material hides an entire building, and the building's own history becomes part of the picture. The making counts as well. The sheets are stitched by large teams in Tamale, and in a 2023 interview with Studio International Mahama described his art as being about the relationships created in that process.
Railways and ghosts
A second thread runs through his work: Ghana's railway, built under British colonial rule and left to decline for decades after independence. For documenta 14 in 2017 he covered the old gatehouse in Kassel with sacks for Check Point Sekondi Loco. 1901–2030., its title naming Sekondi, the port where the colonial railway had its headquarters. Parliament of Ghosts, made for the Manchester International Festival at the Whitworth in 2019, arranged 120 second-class train seats from Ghana's railways into a debating chamber, with old lockers, logbooks and photographs from the railway archive at Sekondi. Visitors could sit and hold their own debates. For Mahama, the abandoned railway stands for opportunities the country let slip after independence.
International recognition
In 2015 Okwui Enwezor included him in All the World's Futures, the main exhibition of the Venice Biennale, where Out of Bounds lined a long passage of the Arsenale with sacks. He showed again in the Ghana pavilion at the 2019 Biennale. In 2024 Purple Hibiscus wrapped part of the Barbican in London in about 2,000 square metres of pink cloth, hand-stitched in Tamale, with batakari robes from northern Ghana sewn into it. In December 2025 ArtReview put him first on its Power 100, the first person from Africa to top the list, and in 2026 he received the Arnold Bode Prize, named after the founder of documenta.
Building in Tamale
Mahama has used his success to build institutions at home. In 2019 he opened the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art in Tamale, a museum and research centre for artists and the public, followed by Red Clay, a studio complex on the edge of the city. In 2021 he bought decommissioned aircraft, which became classrooms where schoolchildren come for free lessons, and colonial-era train carriages are being turned into studios, libraries and learning spaces beside them. The railway, again, is brought back into use.
Where to see his work
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston holds MTN MTN RA (2017), made of jute sacks with tarpaulin and metal tags, bought in 2022. Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery acquired a series of his photographs the same year, the first of his works to enter a British museum. In Tamale, the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art is open to the public.
See also
Yinka Shonibare; Amoako Boafo, the other Ghanaian artist of his generation with a global reputation; El Anatsui; Sharon Dede Padi, another Ghanaian artist who built her work from gathered material, in her case leaves; African textiles; and our list of Ghanaian artists.
