There is a particular quality to a jute sack that has been used. It carries within it the residue of everything it has held — the oils of cocoa beans, the dust of charcoal, the sweat of the hands that tied and untied it, the ink of the names written on its surface by traders who needed to mark their property in the absence of any other documentation. It is, in the most literal sense, an archive: a material record of the global systems of trade, labour, and exchange that have shaped the modern world, and that continue to shape it in ways that are rarely made visible.
Ibrahim Mahama has built one of the most compelling and consequential practices in contemporary art around this single, unremarkable object. Since 2012, the Ghanaian artist has been collecting used jute sacks from the markets of Accra and Kumasi, stitching them together with teams of collaborators, and draping the resulting patchworks over buildings, passageways, and architectural structures around the world. The scale of these installations is staggering — entire façades of museums, airports, bridges, and national monuments have been covered in Mahama’s tattered, marked, and layered fabric — but the power of the work lies not in its scale alone. It lies in the specificity of the material, in the histories embedded within it, and in the rigorous conceptual intelligence that Mahama brings to the question of what it means to make art from the discarded objects of a globalised economy.
The Material and Its Meaning
The jute sack’s biography is, in miniature, the biography of globalisation itself. The sacks are manufactured in Southeast Asia — primarily Bangladesh and India — and imported into Ghana by the Ghana Cocoa Board, which uses them to bag and transport cocoa beans grown by local farmers. Once the cocoa has been emptied into containers for export to Europe and elsewhere, the sacks are sold on to local traders, who use them to transport rice, maize, and other foodstuffs. They are then passed on again, to charcoal sellers — and this, as Mahama has explained, is the point of no return, because once a sack has been used for charcoal, it cannot be used for anything else .
The sack’s journey — from Southeast Asian factory to Ghanaian cocoa farm to European chocolate manufacturer to local market trader to charcoal seller — traces the full arc of a global commodity chain, from production to consumption to disposal. Along the way, it accumulates the marks of every hand that has touched it: the names of traders written in marker pen, the stains of the goods it has carried, the repairs made to tears and holes, the general wear of a material that has been used to its absolute limit. When Mahama asks traders to exchange their old, marked sacks for newer, unmarked ones — a transaction that is central to his practice — he is not simply acquiring raw material. He is acquiring testimony .
“Visually and materially, the jute sack represents the history of Ghana’s post-independence era. I am interested in how crisis and failure are absorbed into this material with a strong reference to global transaction and how capitalist structures work.”
The insight that animates Mahama’s practice is that these sacks are not simply objects; they are what he calls “archival documents, marked with time, form and place” . To drape them over a building is to bring that archive into contact with another archive — the building itself, with its own history of use, neglect, aspiration, and failure. The collision of these two archives is where Mahama’s installations generate their meaning.
Collaboration as Method
No account of Mahama’s practice can ignore the centrality of collaboration. The jute sack installations are not made by a single artist in a studio; they are made by teams of people — market traders, artisans, scaffolders, architects, technicians, and community members — whose labour is as integral to the work as Mahama’s own conceptual vision. The first installation he made with jute sacks, at Mallam Atta market in Accra in 2012, was installed by the market traders themselves — people whose lives had been shaped by the same conditions the work was attempting to describe .
This is not simply a logistical necessity; it is a philosophical position. Mahama grew up in a large polygamous family in Tamale, northern Ghana, where the values of equality and redistribution were instilled from childhood. “When I was growing up, I always had new brothers and sisters,” he has said. “It’s very important for us to be able to distribute resources” . This ethic of collectivity runs through everything he does. In interviews, he almost always uses “we” rather than “I” to describe his work and its impact.
The collaborative dimension of Mahama’s practice extends to the question of documentation. Many of his collaborators — particularly those from northern Ghana who travel south for work — have tattooed their names and other biographical information on their own skin, because they lack the paper documentation that would otherwise identify them. Mahama has photographed these tattooed forearms, and in doing so has performed a transformation: from commodity back to body, from anonymous labour back to named individual . This act of documentation is itself a work of art, and it points to one of the central concerns of Mahama’s practice: the question of who gets to be visible, and on what terms.
Key Works: From Venice to Manchester to New York
Out of Bounds (2015). Mahama’s breakthrough on the international stage came with Out of Bounds, his contribution to the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015. For this work, he covered the walls of the Arsenale — the medieval dockyard that is one of the Biennale’s principal venues — in a vast patchwork of stitched jute sacks, creating an immersive corridor that visitors had to walk through to reach the exhibitions inside. The work was both formally overwhelming and conceptually precise: the Arsenale, as a site of historical maritime trade and colonial expansion, was the perfect context for a material that embodied the contemporary legacies of those same systems . Out of Bounds brought Mahama international acclaim, gallery representation with White Cube, and the financial resources that he has since channelled back into the development of contemporary art in Ghana.
Parliament of Ghosts (2019). Commissioned for the Manchester International Festival, Parliament of Ghosts took a different approach to Mahama’s characteristic concerns. Rather than jute sacks, the work used scores of old railway carriage seats from Ghana’s defunct national rail network, arranged in rows in a parliamentary configuration and accompanied by transcribed minutes from previous Ghanaian governments. The work was both an elegy for the failed promises of post-independence Ghana — the railway, like so many of Nkrumah’s modernisation projects, was abandoned after the 1966 coup — and a meditation on the relationship between Manchester and Ghana, two cities connected by the history of the Industrial Revolution and the global trade in raw materials . After the Manchester exhibition closed, Mahama had the installation rebuilt in Tamale as a functional public space, where visitors can sit together and debate. It is now a site of dialogue rather than a work of art — a transformation that is entirely consistent with Mahama’s understanding of what art is for.
Capital Corpses (2019–21). In this work, a hundred rusty sewing machines are affixed to colonial-era wooden school desks, creating a syncopated cacophony of noise when activated. The sewing machines — once a ubiquitous tool in Ghana, used by workers to hastily adopt a new trade in the wake of economic disruption — are flanked by blackboards that function as palimpsests, their surfaces inscribed with names, notes, and directions that call attention to the act of writing as a site of changing meaning . The work is one of Mahama’s most formally inventive, and one of his most direct engagements with the question of labour and its obsolescence.
A Spell of Good Things (2024). Mahama’s first solo exhibition in New York, presented at White Cube in September 2024, drew its title from Ayòbámi Adébáyò’s novel of the same name. The centrepiece of the exhibition was an assemblage of decrepit beds from the Tamale Teaching Hospital — where Mahama’s own brother died as a result of the resource shortages that have plagued the facility — alongside parts salvaged from defunct train carriages. The leather “sheets” covering some of the beds were inscribed with the names of individuals who died at the hospital, those displaced by post-independence economic instability, and location names drawn from British colonial maps, tattooed with carbon from kerosene lamps . The work was among the most personal and the most politically charged of Mahama’s career, and it marked a significant deepening of his engagement with the specific histories of northern Ghana.
Building Institutions: Art as Infrastructure
One of the most distinctive aspects of Ibrahim Mahama’s practice is his commitment to using the proceeds of his international success to build cultural infrastructure in his home region of northern Ghana. Since 2019, he has established three interconnected institutions in and around Tamale: the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art (SCCA), an exhibition space dedicated to twentieth-century Ghanaian art; Red Clay Studio, an open studio and cultural centre that encompasses artist studios, recording facilities, and repurposed airplanes; and Nkrumah Volini, a cultural centre housed in one of the abandoned grain silos built during Nkrumah’s presidency and subsequently neglected for decades .
The choice of the grain silo as a cultural venue is characteristic of Mahama’s approach. These enormous concrete structures were built to store food and achieve economic independence for post-independence Ghana; when Nkrumah was overthrown in 1966, they were abandoned and became, in the popular imagination, symbols of failure and even damnation. Mahama’s decision to excavate and restore one of them — discovering in the process that it had become a habitat for bats, owls, fish, and plants — is an act of what he calls “time travel”: a return to the moment of potential that preceded the failure, and an attempt to realise, belatedly, what might have been .
The capital generated by the sale of his jute works has become, in his words, “a kind of new material” — one that can produce a new discourse, a more communal one . In 2025, Mahama was awarded the Gold Medal at the inaugural Art Basel Awards and topped the ArtReview Power 100 list, becoming the first African artist to occupy the number one position . In 2026, he was awarded the Arnold Bude prize in Kassel, Germany . These recognitions are significant not only as markers of individual achievement but as indicators of a broader shift in the art world’s relationship to artists from the Global South — a shift that Mahama himself has been instrumental in driving.
Why Mahama’s Work Matters Now
Ibrahim Mahama’s practice is, at its core, an argument about visibility. The jute sack is invisible in the global economy — it is the container, not the content; the means, not the end; the labour, not the product. By making it the primary material of monumental public installations, Mahama makes visible what the global economy renders invisible: the labour of the people who grow, harvest, transport, and process the goods that flow through the world’s commodity chains; the histories of the communities that have been shaped, and often damaged, by those chains; and the material residues — the stains, the tears, the inscribed names — that testify to the human cost of a system that treats people as instruments of production rather than as ends in themselves.
This is not a nostalgic or a sentimental practice. Mahama is not mourning the past; he is interrogating it, and using it to imagine a different future. His institutions in Tamale are not memorials to failure; they are experiments in what art can do when it is understood as a form of social infrastructure rather than a luxury commodity. His collaborators are not assistants; they are co-authors, whose knowledge of the materials and the conditions that produced them is as essential to the work as Mahama’s own formal and conceptual intelligence.
In a moment when the art world is increasingly attentive to questions of decolonisation, redistribution, and the politics of visibility, Mahama’s practice offers something rarer and more valuable than a theoretical position: a sustained, materially grounded, and institutionally committed demonstration of what those values look like in practice.
Explore Further
Ibrahim Mahama — View Artist Profile on Art United
FAQ
What materials does Ibrahim Mahama use in his installations?
Mahama is best known for his use of used jute sacks — the bags originally manufactured in Southeast Asia and imported into Ghana to transport cocoa beans. He also works with a wide range of other salvaged materials, including railway carriage seats and parts, colonial-era school desks, sewing machines, hospital beds, shoemaker boxes, Dutch wax fabric, and archival documents. All of these materials are chosen for the histories they carry and the systems they embody.
Why does Ibrahim Mahama use jute sacks specifically?
Mahama began thinking about jute sacks in 2011, while waiting at the Ghanaian border and watching trucks transport goods across it. He was struck by the contrast between the ease with which goods could cross borders and the difficulty faced by people trying to do the same. The jute sack, with its biography spanning Southeast Asian manufacture, Ghanaian cocoa farming, European export, and local market trade, became for him a material embodiment of the global commodity chain and its human costs.
What is the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art?
The SCCA is one of three cultural institutions that Mahama has established in Tamale, northern Ghana, using proceeds from his international art sales. Founded in 2019, it is dedicated to exhibiting twentieth-century Ghanaian art and has hosted retrospectives of artists including Kofi Dawson and Agyeman Ossei. It is part of a broader ecosystem that includes Red Clay Studio and Nkrumah Volini, all of which are open to the public.
What are Ibrahim Mahama’s most significant recent achievements?
In 2024, Mahama won the inaugural Sam Gilliam Award from the DIA Art Foundation and presented his first solo exhibition in New York at White Cube. In 2025, he was awarded the Gold Medal at the inaugural Art Basel Awards and became the first African artist to top the ArtReview Power 100 list. In 2026, he won the Arnold Bude prize in Kassel, Germany, and was featured at the Venice Biennale.
Which galleries represent Ibrahim Mahama?
Mahama is represented by White Cube (London, New York, Hong Kong, Paris, Seoul) and APALAZZO Gallery (Brescia, Italy).