Ibrahim Mahama: Songs about Roses
A Ghanaian artist critically acclaimed for his evocative large-scale, site-specific installations that speak to the cultural and social effects of post-colonialism and global migration. With new writing commissioned from curator Aby Gaye and Congelese artist Godelive Kasangati as well as an interview with Ibrahim Mahama.
Born in Tamale in 1987, Mahama burst onto the international art scene at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015 with Out of Bounds, a work that clad the massive outside wall of the Arsenale in jute sacks to make a visually spectacular and thought-provoking installation. This work set the tone for what has become Mahama’s on-going investigation into the life of materials and their dynamic potential – the jute sacks telling a visual history of the narratives of production and trade, and the more human tales embodied within.
Featuring extensive installation photography of his new work created exclusively for Fruitmarket as well as an expanded selection of his immersive installations this book will also detail the processes behind the works he makes and Red Clay Studio, a cultural institution which is a space for interrogation and artistic change in Ghana.
Aby Gaye-Duparc was International Development Coordinator for the Friends of the Centre Pompidou (2019–2021), and notably in the acquisition group for Africa, she is currently Artistic Project Coordinator at the Fondation Cartier and a PhD candidate at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, in Paris.
Godelive Kasangati Kabena is an artist from the Democratic Republic of Congo. She currently lives and works between Kinshasa and Kumasi, where she is pursuing her PhD at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology . Her work draws on speculative research and reflects on engagement of different bodies – these bodies, opening an emancipatory speculative field of post-humanist analysis while engaging in a discursive arena about reproduction and notions of axiomatic equality.