Biennale of Sydney

Ibrahim Mahama

Born 1987 in Tamale, Ghana
Lives and works in Tamale, Accra and Kumasi, Ghana

Ibrahim Mahama’s spectacular installations of sewn charcoal sacks are the result of his investigation of the conditions of the body in relation to both architecture and history. The practice takes many forms and one of the final products – the art – is equally displayed in marketplaces thus defying the artefacts’ intrinsic value system.

Mahama produces the large draping surfaces by carefully assembling sacks imported by the Ghana Cocoa Board and repurposed by charcoal sellers. The sacks present patches, markings and traces of traders’ names and locations on their rough brown skin, which map out the many transits they endure as vessels of commodities. Wrapped around heaps of merchandise in the marketplace or embracing the contours of a museum building, the spreads of jute fibres become an oversized socio-political inquiry of the origin of materials, referencing what is normally hidden for the sake of concept or form. Ibrahim Mahama denudes the transits and ownerships of jute sacks along their lives as porters of goods, rendering visible the mechanisms of trade which define the world’s economy.

For the 22nd Biennale of Sydney, Mahama presents a largescale immersive installation, dressing the entirety of the interior Turbine Hall at Cockatoo Island with jute sacks. A crowded patchwork of rich, brown colour and rough and smooth planes, together their hardened surfaces mime the gritty materiality and architecture of the former shipyard and penal colony, to reference and stir the histories of labor and incarceration laying dormant on the island. This work continues Mahama’s material investigation into labour, economic history and production. Taking an almost forensic approach, the artist sees the surfaces of these materials as holding and bearing the physical markers, smells and traces of the networks and industries they previously moved through. This installation differs from other projects in which the artist blankets the exterior architecture of public buildings. In covering the interior of the turbine hall, Mahama creates a conceptual space for us to walk inside, and from within which to consider our own relationship to the layered histories on display through a heightened, bodily engagement with the space. Once inside, we are consumed with the smell, texture, and sensation of the jute, inviting new ways of seeing and occupying this site, caked as it is in layers of divergent and complex histories.

Mahama also presents A Grain of Wheat at Artspace. The immersive installation comprises around 400 upright first aid stretchers dating from the Second World War, which the artist collected from a site near to a Refugee Camp in Athens. Found elements drawn from Ghana embellish the canvas of the stretchers to create an elongated ‘painting’, while aromatic smoked fish papers sourced from West African smokehouses conjure a spectrum of responses. The materials carry with them an explicit residue of their past, existing together archivally as a sensory monument hinting at pain and labour. By presenting them inside an exhibition space, the artist engages in a process of making-visible the histories of their production and circulation, an aesthetic mode which is at odds with the expectations of viewership formed within traditional gallery space.

Courtesy the artist.

About the Fish Curry Recipe 

This recipe is a culinary recognition of the influence of Cape Malay food on South African cuisine that came about as a result of the Dutch colonisation and subsequent slave trade in South East Asia. This resulted in many political prisoners in the region being brought to the Cape of South Africa to serve as political exiles, prisoners or as slaves, in the sixteenth century.

The exiles and slaves who ended up in the Cape of Good Hope came to be collectively  known as Cape Malay though their origins could be traced to places such as Madagascar, Macau, the Dutch East Indies (today, Indonesia), Philippines, East Africa and India.

This mixture of cultures has resulted in a deep fusion of traditional cuisines in the Cape that touches and influences every aspect of the culture of food and food preparation in this region.

The fish curry recipe utilises spices and cooking methods that were introduced into this region by the forced migration of diverse cultures and people.