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Ibrahim Mahama takes over the entire building of the Fondation Cartier
Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama opens "The Harvest Season" on Thursday at the Fondation Cartier for Contemporary Art in Paris, where he occupies the entire building. It is his most ambitious exhibition to date, built on his structures in Tamale, Ghana.
Par la rédaction Walensky · 3 min de lecture
- 200royal Ashanti stools, approximately
- 1966the year the Aboso glass factory was founded
- 100postcards, approximately, as part of a work
Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama opens The Harvest Season on Thursday at the Fondation Cartier for Contemporary Art in Paris. He occupies the entire building. It is the most ambitious exhibition he has staged to date, curated by Aby Gaye-Duparc.
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The project is built upon the structures the artist has erected in Tamale, Ghana. According to Aby Gaye-Duparc, many installations are first produced in Tamale before travelling to Paris or other venues. The curator sees two facets to the artist's practice: the visible works and the infrastructure behind them, which has widened access to art for people who had been excluded from it.
Royal stools, open to the public
The installation Parliament of Ghosts, created in 2019 and still ongoing, is presented in a new version. It brings together some 200 royal stools from the Ashanti Empire, collected and restored, alongside discarded train seats, railway sleepers, school furniture, worn jute sacks and government archives.
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According to Mahama, these stools are often looted before entering Western museums, where they are sometimes placed behind glass. In Paris, the public will have free access to them. He wants in this way to reverse the questions surrounding Europe's restitution of African objects.
"I think the artist is merely a vessel, and I see myself as that vessel for bringing all these things together."
Ibrahim Mahama, artist (remarks translated from English)
A rebuilt glass factory
The new project Things Fall Apart centres on the Aboso glass factory, founded in 1966 by Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana's first president, as part of his industrialisation drive. Nkrumah was overthrown in a coup the same year. The title echoes the 1958 novel by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe.
Mahama bought the factory around two years ago, with production funds from the Fondation Cartier. The Paris installation shows only a small part of it: the factory is also being rebuilt in Tamale and in a colonial-era British building. After the exhibition, the installation will be permanently housed in Kumasi, where he plans a new institution.
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A textile installation is also suspended from the arcades of the façades of the building, constructed in the 1850s. It combines northern Ghanaian textiles, truck inner tubes, jute sacks and found fabrics. For the curator, it sets this historic site in dialogue with nineteenth-century Ghanaian history.
Several artists take part in the exhibition, including James Barnor, Gideon Appah and Dorothy Akpene Amenuke, Mahama's mentor. Architect Courage Dzidula Kpodo recreates a laterite wall, the material of so-called vernacular buildings (built according to local traditions), salvaged from a building he owns in Gyampo. Some 100 postcards from the Postbox Ghana collective accompany it.
Earlier in 2026, Mahama was violently assaulted in Tamale by a special operations unit of the Ghana Police Service. This exhibition is among his first major shows since then. He says he does not know where the investigation stands and plans to press the authorities when he returns to Ghana.
Our view
This exhibition is a reminder that a work carries the trace of everyone who made it possible, from the materials to the hands. At home, one can look at a painting as the result of collective labour as much as the work of a single name.
Source: ARTnews.
