Living and working between Accra, Kumasi, and Tamale, Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama transforms the remnants of global trade into architectural and social propositions. His monumental installations, often stitched from worn jute sacks once used to transport cocoa and other commodities, carry the fingerprints, names, and histories of countless anonymous laborers. Draped over buildings, wrapped around bridges, or reassembled into sprawling interior worlds, these fragile textiles become vast collective monuments—at once poetic and political.

Mahama’s practice is rooted in the contradictions of modernity in Ghana: its promises of progress and the scars of its failures. By reworking materials marked by circulation, exhaustion, and exchange, he constructs spaces that interrogate economies of labor, memory, and displacement, while also imagining new communal futures.

Internationally recognized, Mahama has participated in the 56th, 57th, and 58th Venice Biennale and documenta 14 in Kassel, among other major exhibitions. Beyond the gallery, he has initiated ambitious cultural infrastructures in Ghana, converting abandoned silos, factories, and railways into sites for art, archives, and education—extending his practice into lived civic space.