Achi news desk-
Vthis month the lakeside facade will be covered in a magnificent magenta fabric, which dramatically tames the gray brutalist architecture. Resembling a pavilion or awning, the exterior is transformed by a vast expanse of pinkish-purple striped material, embroidered with drapery that cascades exuberantly down the face of the building. “The building is very masculine and I wanted something that would soften it somehow,” says Ibrahim Mahama, the Ghanaian artist behind this textile takeover.
Based in the northern city of Tamale, Mahama, 36, has gained international fame for encasing buildings in curtains of shredded jute sacks sewn together. Made in Southeast Asia, these sacks are used in Ghana to transport cocoa beans overseas, then reused domestically to transport rice, maize and charcoal. Mahama exchanges new sacks for old ones, which he rewards for the memories, scars and labor embedded in the material. He has covered theatres, ministries and museums at home and abroad in these jute skins, a gesture that invites the viewers to reflect on work, migration and the inequalities of global trade.
His intervention at the Barbican marks his first use of bright colour. It’s also the first time he’s had his fabric made by hand – all 2,000 square meters of it. The artist draws a connection between the 1,000 weavers and seamstresses who produced the material over a period of five months and the laborers in the 70s who finished the concrete surface of the Barbican by hand with pick hammers.
“I thought it was quite beautiful because many workers on this building had to hand chip the concrete to create the texture,” Mahama said. “I was trying to respond to that. So I thought, ‘Why not start on a labor basis and produce everything by hand?'” (There is a further connection as the Barbican stands on what was a thriving center for the rag trade in the Cripplegate neighbourhood, before the flat bombs in the second world war.) Much of the fabric was produced at the Tamale sports stadium. The enormity of the scale of the project is evident from pictures which show the manufacturers toiling in a sea of pink which covers most of the football pitch.
Why pink? “It started as a joke,” Mahama said. “I thought, ‘British weather is always very grey, why not choose a color that contrasts with the sky?'” The installation is titled Purple Hibiscus after Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s daring 2003 novel of the same name about violence at home and religious zealots in post-colonial Nigeria. Mahama often titles his work after novels by African writers as a tribute to their creativity. I would suggest that the color of the fabric opens up another reading of the work as a celebration of queer communities and of human rights in general – no doubt a western perspective, but relevant nonetheless since Ghana passed legislation in February which will, of ‘to confirm, makes it. illegal for anyone to identify as LGBTQ+.
Purple Hibiscus is part of the Barbican’s current textile show Unravel, which has seen a number of artists withdraw their work after the organization canceled plans to hold a speech about the conflict between Israel and Gaza. Mahama says he will proceed with its installation. “For me it’s not as simple as ‘Let’s boycott’,” he explains. “So much hard work has gone into this, the men and women who sewed this material were so excited about what its potential could be. When they see an image of the material covering the building, imagine what it can help produce in Ghana moving forward.”
Mahama has added another layer of meaning to the work by incorporating traditional Ghanaian costumes called batakaris into the fabric, which are worn by everyone from royalty to commoners and are often passed down over many generations. It was a challenge, he said, to persuade people to give up these beloved garments because of long-held superstitions about personal items. “The batakari is like DNA. People believe that if you take it to the shaman, you can somehow put a curse on them, and the curse will go back into the past, and their present and future generations will be affected. “
He had to convince them that the smoke would be used for art, and offer to exchange it for new bakataris or other goods. “But then they don’t give it to you like this,” he said. “Some of them will have to pee on it first because they believe that pee or human excrement is a way of desecrating the material.” These smocks, large and rectangular, or frilled and arched, create an irregular abstract pattern against the pink background, as they cascade and overlap towards the bottom. With their head holes and signs of wear, the clothes imbue the work with a sense of personal connection, of residual beliefs and traditions.
The artist first hit upon the idea of covering objects and infrastructure in 2012 while studying for his masters in fine arts at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, southern Ghana. He had started collecting ragged jute sacks and sewing them together, but he had no idea what he would do with them. One day he brought the material to the market where some traders spontaneously threw it over a pile of charcoal. “That had a big impact on me,” he said. “I decided this is interesting, why not focus on it?” Mahama often finds himself compared to the artist duo Jeanne-Claude and Christo, famous for wrapping buildings from the Reichstag in Berlin to the Pont Neuf in Paris, but where they did it for aesthetics, using industrial fabrics, his concern is with the physical human. labor embodied by the material.
Mahama has had what most would consider a meteoric rise. He has shown at prestigious international art events such as Documenta in Germany and the Sharjah and Venice Biennales. Besides his Barbican commission, he has a solo exhibition at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh and a group show on the sidelines of the Venice Biennale. It has all happened in just 10 years, since he took part in his first international show, at the Saatchi Gallery in London in 2014. That was the first time the idea of becoming an artist seemed achievable. “I was like okay, maybe this is it, let me take my chance.”
With the proceeds from the Saatchi show, Mahama set about creating a new art scene in Tamale, his birthplace and Ghana’s third largest city. To date he has built three cultural centres, what he calls his “life’s work”. There is the Savannah Center for Contemporary Art, its sister institution the Red Clay Studio, and Nkrumah Volini, which converted from a disused silo that had been built at the euphoric height of Ghana’s independence in 1957 from British colonial rule.
Although these places host exhibitions, performances and lectures, they are not cultural centers as we know them. They are also living history museums and archaeological sites, filled with relics from colonial times and Ghana’s thwarted economic hopes before the 1966 overthrow of its first post-independence president, Kwame Nkrumah. Mahama has collected hundreds of meters of train tracks originally laid by the British to transport gold and repurposed them for artistic and educational use; he has salvaged train carriages and decommissioned aircraft, turning them into classrooms. He is interested in failure as a proposition for regeneration. “I’ve always thought that we can use crisis and failure as a kind of protagonist in order to be able to create new experiences,” he said.
Everything he earns from his work, Mahama plows back into these projects. Purple Hibiscus will therefore return to Ghana after its run at the Barbican to be expanded and used in installations across the country. At the heart of his practice is the idea of sharing his work at home. “My primary audience is the community members and the children,” he said. “In my work, translating or redistributing art through these children, and what it produces in the future ideologically and materially, is the most important thing for me.”
Mahama has just won the first $75,000 Sam Gilliam prize from the Dia Art Foundation, named after the pioneering American abstract painter. Some of the money will go towards a scholarship fund for university students. The rest hopes to invest in building a new art school to be named after his teacher and mentor Karî’kachä Seid’ou, “one of the most significant art supporters on the continent in the 20th century”. Seid’ou’s radical ideas about the expansion and democratization of art informed Mahama’s appreciation of contempt.
For Mahama, every piece of scrap has value and beauty; apart from jute sacks and batakaris, he has amassed hundreds of old shoe repair boxes, sewing machines, colonial era school desks and railway seats and turned them into giant sculptures that hold powerful narratives. “When things are old and scarred, I believe there are spirits in them,” he said. “Those spirits have the potential to allow us to transcend the boundaries of how we see the world.”
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