Artists

Ibrahim Mahama is a Ghanaian contemporary artist known for large-scale installations, sculptures, and architectural interventions exploring global trade, labor, economic inequality, migration, and the legacies of colonialism in Africa. Born in 1987 in Tamale, the ninth of ten children in a polygamous family, Mahama was influenced early on by his father, a civil engineer and road contractor, and went on to study fine art at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Kumasi, earning a BFA in Painting in 2010, an MFA in Painting and Sculpture in 2013, and a PhD in Fine Art in 2015.

Mahama is best known for transforming discarded jute sacks — originally used to transport cocoa, charcoal, and other commodities across Ghana's trade networks — into monumental tapestries that wrap buildings, plazas, and public infrastructure, work he refers to as "Occupations." Acquired from traders and stitched together collaboratively with local communities and migrant workers, the sacks carry the traces of labor, exchange, and global commerce, materializing what Mahama has called a form of "time travel" through crisis, decay, and historical memory. He gained international recognition in 2015 with Out of Bounds at the 56th Venice Biennale, where he wrapped the Arsenale's walls in stitched jute sacks under the curation of Okwui Enwezor; the work was later named one of Frieze's 25 Best Works of the 21st Century. In 2019, Mahama represented Ghana as the youngest artist in the country's first-ever national pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

Beyond his studio practice, Mahama has built a network of arts and educational institutions in and around Tamale — the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art, Red Clay Studio, and Nkrumah Voli-ni — which together welcome more than 100,000 visitors a year and offer free educational programming to local schoolchildren. In 2025, he became the first artist from the African continent to top ArtReview's Power 100 and received the Art Basel & UBS Artist of the Year Award. His work has been exhibited at Documenta 14 (Athens and Kassel), the Barbican Centre, the Norval Foundation, and the National Gallery of Art, and is held in the permanent collections of the Centre Pompidou, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, among many others. Mahama is represented by White Cube and APALAZZOGALLERY. He lives and works in Ghana.