The Physical Impossibility of Debt in the Mind of Something Living (2025), a new work made for Mahama’s solo show at Kunsthalle Wien, features a hollowed-out diesel locomotive, originally purchased by Ghana from Germany and the UK via IMF loans to carry goods for export, sitting atop several thousand headpans – a traditional method of transporting goods in Ghana. It is a typically neat entanglement of capitalism and waste, colonialism and neocolonialism, that the artist has made his own, utilising industrial scrap, from textiles to shoemaker boxes, from rusting hospital beds to largescale infrastructure, in his sculptures and installations. Mahama came to prominence in his use of jute sacks and remnant textiles, leftover cloth from Ghana’s cocoa industry, and later used to hold vegetables and coal, stitched together by teams to then form oversize quilts he has draped over buildings – from the former Food Distribution Corporation building in Accra to London’s Barbican Centre; this year he also wrapped the exterior of Kunsthalle Bern and MoCA Skopje, disguising architecture while foregrounding industry and labour; and took part in November’s Thailand Biennale in Phuket. His solo exhibition at the new Ibraaz space in London was a proposed meeting space, gathering chairs from Ghanaian households on a platform made from wood reclaimed from Ghana’s colonial railway system. His shows often evidence the links between disparate locations, the materials as traces of global trade routes and extractivist politics within which we have long been intertwined.
Mahama’s aesthetic shares its roots with, more immediately, artists such as fellow Ghanaian and key influence El Anatsui, or a wider pool that might include Subodh Gupta or Melvin Edwards, where yesterday’s detritus becomes potent symbols for today’s continuing inequalities. But his presence at the top of this year’s list is also for his role as an institution maker. The question of who benefits from Ghanaian labour has led Mahama to question the art market too, resulting in his decision to plough his blue-chip-sales profits into a series of institutions in his hometown of Tamale: the Red Clay Studio, the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art (SCCA) and Nkrumah Volini, which act as open studios and sites of production, as well as hosting residencies, student projects, children’s workshops and exhibitions. SCCA this year hosted The Writing’s on the Wall, a group show curated by blaxTARLINES member Robin Riskin, and partnered with Michael Armitage’s Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute for the collaborative exhibition Notes on Friendship: Breaking Bread. Red Clay Studio’s site is peppered with old planes now used to hold workshops with students, and the husks of trains that feature in Mahama’s exhibitions. The artist has often spoken of making use of the contradictions inherent in his own art production and distribution towards efforts of redistribution. With workshop-led projects taking shape for December’s Kochi-Muziris Biennale and next year at the maps museum in Køge, Denmark, alongside a forthcoming show of work in Singapore, Mahama continues to pose questions of what art does, and who it is for, with no one answer. Between these sites and activities, Mahama is offering the role of the artist as localised institution builder, arts educator and community advocate, drawing on the proclivities of the international artworld to fuel, but not guide or determine, what art might be otherwise. As old models of museums and galleries continue to struggle, the potential of new forms for the support and distribution of art, whether as formal institutions or shifting hubs, are key issues for the present and near future that Mahama is helping to shape.
