00:01Ghanaian-born Ibrahim Mahama is one of the world's most influential artists.
00:06He's changing the way we think about art.
00:09He shows his works all over the world, including at the Venice Biennale.
00:13His pieces highlight social ills and global injustice,
00:17earning him international fame.
00:20For me, it's rather an opportunity to see that the work that we do
00:26means something to the world and to the communities that we come from.
00:30Because for us, the idea of making art has always been about the question of the gifts.
00:34What does art mean?
00:36And what are the associated responsibilities that come along with it?
00:39So when you're an artist, it's not just about making beautiful objects,
00:42but it's about the criticality that you also bring to the world.
00:46Ibrahim Mahama grew up in northern Ghana,
00:48far from the spotlight of the global art scene.
00:51He went on to study in Kumasi, one of the country's creative hubs,
00:54and now runs a vast studio complex in Tamale,
00:58a network of massive halls that function as both workshops and exhibition spaces.
01:09When I started making art from secondary school,
01:12a lot of people at the time, they didn't quite understand the significance of it,
01:15because normally you are quite skeptical if your relative is doing art,
01:20because you don't know whether they will be able to earn a living out of it one day.
01:23But for me, the question was never really about earning a living.
01:26It was about doing it and doing it right,
01:28and then truly asking the meaningful questions that are required within the practice itself.
01:34Mahama's work is far from glamorous.
01:37His international breakthrough came when he draped whole buildings in old burlap sacks.
01:43Like the theatre in Ghana's capital city of Accra,
01:46or the watchtower at the 2017 Castle Documenta.
01:53And this room at the 2015 Venice Biennale.
01:58But the burlap sack was not a random choice of medium.
02:02It embodies the history of Ghana's cocoa trade.
02:05The cocoa beans leave the country, and only the sack remains.
02:10I'm really interested in what happens to the bag once it is no longer being used for cocoa.
02:14The market women will use it to bag rice, maize, millet.
02:18At that point, it has really absorbed what all the politics and the history of the world within it,
02:23in terms of like this kind of inter-global trade dialogues and all that.
02:27And also the inequalities that are absorbed within it in terms of like labour extraction and all kinds of other
02:32things.
02:32These used objects all have a history telling stories of trade, labour and power.
02:38Their history continues to resonate.
02:41He even turns scrapped trains into works of art, like here at a Vienna exhibition in 2025.
02:47All the materials that I collect are normally things that you wouldn't look at twice.
02:51Yeah, when you see them, you think that, oh, these are old, they are discarded, they are dead.
02:55But it's the role of the artist in order to be able to have a vision and courage,
02:59in order to be able to, what, excavate and reawaken the senses within these materials.
03:06Ibrahim Mahama's focus lately is on these terracotta vessels, once used to store water or food.
03:14He showed them in Sao Paulo, Brazil in 2023, and they also feature in his current exhibition in Venice.
03:22Glass blowers from Murano emulated them there based on Ibrahim's designs.
03:31A lot of these terracotta forms are no longer produced on a scale that they were used to be produced.
03:39Because a lot of the women who produce this, the children are no longer interested in learning their skill.
03:45You know, so on many different levels, there is a certain kind of crisis when it comes to like the
03:50history of crafts,
03:51particularly coming from different parts of the world.
03:52So if you take this for instance, you realize that there are all these multi-layers within it.
03:58So on the side, you can see like all the different histories of repair and all that.
04:02And as an artist, I'm very much interested in what, the craftsmanship is not just about the making of the
04:07object,
04:07but it's also about the preservation of the object.
04:11In the international art world, Ibrahim has reached number one on the list of the 100 most influential artists.
04:21This prestigious list is published annually by the British Art Review magazine.
04:27It's not just because his art is so great.
04:30I think it's because in some ways he is emblematic of how the role of the artist is being redefined
04:36in today's culture.
04:37So he does make art and that does have a message which is to do with restitution and justice.
04:43But he also carries that through in terms of his own actions outside the artwork.
04:48Culture is what drives the engine of the world in terms of the soul of the world itself.
04:53So whatever be the case, we need to be able to invest more in it so that at least it
04:57can somehow give birth to a generation in the future
05:01that can somehow think about different ways of resolving the politics within the world.
05:06Can art change the world?
05:09Ibrahim Mahama certainly believes it can.
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