Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama: ‘Power is building structures, not visibility’

Ibrahim Mahama on topping the 2025 ArtReview’s Power 100 list, making art with colonial detritus, and travelling to Kochi Muziris Biennale and Venice Biennale

At the recently-concluded Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB), Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama repurposed detritus of colonial/postcolonial infrastructure to reconstruct his much-discussed Parliament of Ghosts installation.

I had first seen this work at the 2023 Venice Biennale. In Kochi, at the disused Anand Warehouse in Mattancherry, his chamber represented unrealised futures of Ghanaian independence and development: jute bags once used to transport pepper and timber became the walls, while chairs in various sizes and shapes lined up to create, over the course of the sixth edition of KMB, a site for book launches, workshops and public conversations.

“The materials — train seats, lockers, fragments of infrastructure — carry within them very specific historical trajectories. They belong to a moment when the promise of independence was closely tied to ideas of industrialisation, mobility, and collective progress. At the same time, many of these projects were interrupted, abandoned, or never fully realised...I’m interested in what it means to stay with these residues rather than move past them. The ‘ghosts’ are not only about loss,” says Mahama. “They are also about the persistence of unrealised possibilities... For me, the question is not how to rebuild the parliament that never fully existed, but how to imagine new forms of assembly and citizenship that emerge from the fragments we have inherited.”

Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama topped the 2025 ArtReview’s Power 100 list. | Photo Credit: Thulasi Kakkat/The Hindu

Mahama’s work explores how infrastructures of trade and empire shape contemporary life. He has directed the profits from his shows towards opening art institutions in his hometown of Tamale, Ghana: the Red Clay Studio, the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art (SCCA) and Nkrumah Volini, a space for exhibitions. Next month, the 38-year-old cultural figure will return to the world’s most important art event, Venice Biennale, where he will be part of a global line-up of artists engaging with themes of history, labour and postcolonial memory.

Ibrahim Mahama’s ‘Parliament of Ghosts’ at the just-concluded Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Kochi, India. | Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Kochi Biennale Foundation