Ibrahim Mahama: The Memory of Love

For the Nantes site, Ibrahim Mahama proposes an original installation that mixes architecture, fourniture, sculpture, and the music archive. Recycling elements (doors, windows…) from his workshop in Tamale, Ghana-on the site of an old 1960s Brutalist-style silo-combined with a selection from his personal collection of wax and other colorful handmade textiles with multiple symbols and meanings, he invites the viewer on a sonic and visual journey through time.
Once again, Ibrahim Mahama continues his investigation of his country’s history and its still perceptible consequences.
The consequences-still perceptible-of the post-independence period.

Ibrahim Mahama‘s work plays with the meaning of objects, structures and even history. With his productions, the artist seeks to occupy spaces emptied by history. He uses the materiality of objects to convey memories and, even more, buried, forbidden, hidden memories. He collects, diverts, returns, assembles, suspends.

Through the accumulation of traditional materials and objects used to their near destruction, Ibrahim Mahama observes how the body remains visible in all these signs of wear and tear: the burlap sack, emptied of its contents, bears the sweat, the writing, the tearing of men. Facing the stories of these bodies in suspension, the artist also suggests another body: that of the viewer.