Ibrahim Mahama: Zilijifa

A major new exhibition by Ibrahim Mahama is installed across the first floor of the Kunsthalle’s Museumsquartier building. The exhibition presents an entirely new body of commissioned work, including installation, photography and video, in which Mahama draws upon the material legacy of colonialism, post-colonialism and industrialisation in Ghana. It is Mahama’s first solo exhibition in Austria.

Mahama’s exhibition at Kunsthalle Wien develops his research on the history of the Ghanaian railway network, first established under British colonial rule during the 1890s. It realises a long-term aspiration to deconstruct, transport and exhibit a full-size diesel locomotive—one of several British- and German-built trains that Mahama acquires from 2022 onwards. The mechanisms, vessels and networks employed in transporting goods and people serve as the starting point for a series of works that consider the act of loading, carrying and unloading weight, alongside a more abstract notion of the weight of history. Remnants of the railway, an industrial system for transport and trade, are combined with objects and images that refer to the physical act of bearing weight with the body. The centrepiece of the exhibition is an installation that uses a multitude of enamelled iron ‘headpans’ as a support for a locomotive.

These pans are commonplace vessels used in Ghana to carry goods and materials. Mahama amasses a collection of thousands of used pans, exchanging new for old. Chipped, rusted, dented and torn, the objects show evidence of heavy use. Stacked beneath the train, they support a locomotive that may also be understood as a different kind of vessel.

An accompanying series of photographic works considers the damage inflicted on the human body through the daily activity of carrying headpans. These include over 100 X-ray images of spinal deformation, framed within a metal scaffold removed from the train. At once a symbol of and a system for colonial and capitalist extraction, Mahama’s critique positions the railway as an infrastructure literally built on the backs of Ghanaian people.