German railway history sometimes comes across you in unexpected places. Opposite the Louvre, for example, in the art foundation of a jewelry company. There is a jagged palimpsest hanging on the wall in the form of a rectangle, earthy brown tones with handwritten names on it. The image is a mix of weathered wood and mummified leather.
On the one hand, the African heat has worn out the railway wagons of the Henschel company from Kassel, but on the other hand it has also preserved them. Ibrahim Mahama, a Ghanaian whiz kid in the art world, tore the floors out of the wagons and used them as a surface for painting. In the lower quarter there are words: Barikis, Zakiya, Munira, Safia, Meriga. They are first names.
During the period of railway construction in Ghana from the 1920s onwards, many people from the north of the country went to the south, says Mahama, standing in his solo show at the Fondation Cartier in Paris. Among them was his grandfather, who worked as a cook on British colonial ships. "Many of them only provided a first name when they registered. That's why some, for example, tattooed their place of origin on their bodies."
In the event of an accident, families could be notified. The skin became an identification card. In 2002, the Henschel locomotives were sold and were destined to end up as scrap metal in China. "When I found out about it, I met the scrap dealer. We negotiated and he agreed to sell it to us. But in pieces because it was already dismantled," said Mahama.
“So we asked for the phone number of the welder who had cut the locomotive apart, found him and hired him - this time to weld the locomotive back together.”
It's clear that this didn't come off without traces, but that didn't bother the artist. Ibrahim Mahama is experienced in breathing new life into discarded things and reassembling them into something new. In his exhibition “Le Temps des récoltes” (in German: Harvest Time) he rebuilt parts of a former Ghanaian bottle factory. It marked the country's attempt to stand on its own two feet economically after independence in 1957, instead of just being a supplier of raw materials to industrialized nations.
In general, world trade. Mahama's artistic trademark is jute sacks in which cocoa and coal travel around the world, originating in Africa. The bags wear out over time, and the patches often actually look like scars. “If you cut them up and use them again and again, over time they become a kind of body themselves,” explains Mahama. "I really liked all of these lines that ran across the locomotive, this kind of scarring, the traces of the interventions. I found this formal language fascinating."
Mahama ties colonial history to tangible things
The art world happily embraces the narrative of wear and tear and recycling. Born in 1987, Ibrahim Mahama is currently on a roll. In 2025 he was allowed to cover the Bern Kunsthalle, he was honored in the “Established Artists” category at the inaugural Art Basel Awards in Miami Beach and was chosen number one in the art world rankings by the editorial team of the magazine “ArtReview”, the first African to do so. In Kassel he was just awarded the city's Arnold Bode Prize.
Nine years ago he dressed up the classicist gate guard in Kassel at Documenta 14, curated by Adam Szymczyk. It was an astonishing sight, shabby and almost brutal, but also effective. The Fondation Cartier has been spared such a complete transformation. Mahama's jute sacks hang more decoratively in the arched arcades of the building, while Paris armed itself against the riot with plywood walls and police forces during the opening days.
We learn: Kwame Nkrumah, the first Ghanaian president and recurring protagonist in Mahama's exhibition, was overthrown by the military in 1966 during a trip to Asia. He was currently on his way to a peacekeeping mission in Vietnam. There is no need to fear this in France, but the central role of the economy and economic dependencies should give one pause. Mahama ties colonial and postcolonial history to tangible things rather than negotiating them in the abstract. There is hardly any material in his work that does not have a history, from the jute sacks to the glass bottles and the names tattooed into the picture.
The artist explains that old petroleum lanterns were used for the tattoos. "The soot that was deposited at the top of the lantern was scraped off and mixed with petroleum and various local herbs. That's how tattooing was done back then: in a very archaic, crude way."
The means are archaic and simple, but the approach is so global. In Ghana, Mahama invests the money he earned in the international art market in nonprofits such as the Savanna Center for Contemporary Art and the Red Clay Studio in his hometown of Tamale in the north of the country. The approach of bringing the work of nine other artists and collectives to Paris makes the exhibition diverse. The show shows photographs by the Ghanaian photographer James Barnor, who has been practicing for over seventy years, and the works of a cooperative of Congolese plantation workers, whose surreal sculptures consist of cocoa, palm oil and sugar - a formal language somewhere between Dieter Roth and Thomas Schütte.
Everything, according to the message, happens together, in a palaver. The “Parliament of Spirits” occupies a prominent place in the expansive show. It is a collection of hundreds of wooden stools, individually handcrafted in the carving tradition of the Ashanti people native to Ghana, who resisted the British for decades. It was not until 1901 that the Ashanti Empire became a British crown colony, and then Ghana became independent in 1957. The spirits are supposed to do politics here and the visitors are supposed to entertain themselves.
A discovery are the textile and paper works of Dorothy Akpene Amenuke, whose deep red fabric bulges enliven the cool architecture of Jean Nouvel. The Fondation Cartier has been located here on the Place du Palais Royal for a year in a former 19th-century temple of consumerism in which the colonies' wealth was ostentatiously piled up.
The architect Jean Nouvel gutted the house over many years and opened the ground floor with its shop windows to the street so seamlessly that only centimeters separate you from the passers-by rushing by on Rue de Rivoli. The levels can be changed flexibly. The tourists are now walking above, while half-naked men are carrying railway sleepers below, their muscled bodies drawn with charcoal pencil on the forms of a Ghanaian factory.
Isn't that a little illustrative, a little too 1:1? Ibrahim Mahama, as becomes clear in conversation, simply has a different concept of art. When he and his team designed the exhibition, he says, the starting point was the collective workings of his studio in Ghana. "We basically work collaboratively there and invite artists from different parts of the world. The idea is to make art as everyday as possible."
“To make art as common as possible” – “common” can also be translated as “ordinary”. Everyone has to know for themselves whether they like it. In any case, for Mahama it's a pretty successful concept.
