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‘We’re haunted all the time by ghosts of the past,” says Ibrahim Mahama as we sit on dirty old plastic second-class Ghana Railways carriage seats in Manchester’s Whitworth Art Gallery. Even these seats from an abandoned railway? “Especially these,” he says, smiling.
Mahama, a junkyard utopian whose art involves recycling stuff that’s lost its purpose, bought up rows and rows of these seats. He packed them into shipping containers and sent them on a 5,000-mile trip, from his west African homeland to the Whitworth, along with some school cupboards no longer fit for purpose, exercise books of children now grown up, and the minutes of Ghanaian parliamentary debates now deemed obsolete.
Then he arranged rows of seats into terraces, ringed the seats with the cupboards, and filled their shelves with the books so that intrigued visitors can thumb through them during the Manchester international festival. He’s also used the leather from the first-class seats to bind albums of historic photographs from Ghana’s early independence years. He calls the resulting installation Parliament of Ghosts.
Parliament of Ghosts seems to critique many things – colonialism, Ghana’s past and Brexit, too. “Not everything is about Brexit,” he laughs. “But sure. It’s about Brexit among other things. Ghana is very connected with Britain even now. So why not Brexit?”
Connected is an understatement. From 1867 to 1957, the Gold Coast was a British colony, stitched together from more than 70 ethics groups each with their own language, plundered for labour as well as minerals and commodities such as gold and cocoa. Even after independence, Britain couldn’t keep its nose out: along with the US, Britain strove to undermine Ghana’s attempt at economic self-sufficiency in its early independent years by putting in place trade barriers and stockpiling cocoa to collapse its price. All of this took place before Mahama was born, but the history resurfaces again and again in his work – utopias dashed, the labour that went into projects that became obsolete. And yet, for all that, his art is hopeful – imagining that something good can be snatched from these jaws.
“My hope,” he says, “is to start conversations at a time when there are very few meaningful ones. My art is political in that sense – as well as aesthetic.” Aesthetic? “Well, these things are quite beautiful, no?”
To realise that hope, the Whitworth should really turn off the gallery’s wifi for the duration of the exhibition. After posing for photos, Mahama returns to the parliament to find that everyone occupying its seats – me, his assistant, contractors installing the show – is not talking but staring gormlessly into our phones, trapped in our filter bubbles. We are the problem; Mahama’s installation, just possibly, the solution.
But the revolution Mahama has in mind is an African rather than European one. When Mahama’s Parliament is taken down in September, it will be packed up, returned to Ghana and installed in his home town of Tamale. This spring, Mahama opened the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art there, providing an artist-run project space, exhibition and research hub, cultural repository and artists’ residency built by one of his fathers (he comes from a polygamous family), a building contractor. He hopes his Parliament of Ghosts will become permanent in Tamale.
“I’m an artist who wants to work in Africa. And I am also tired of producing work that gets exported to Europe and America. I want local people to experience art made in Ghana, as well as to experience what you experience.”
Fair enough, but Mahama is currently a hot commodity outside Africa; his image hangs in a huge banner on the outside of the Whitworth. “It is very strange to appear that way,” he says. He’s represented by the UK’s White Cube and earlier this year became the youngest artist to exhibit in the first Ghanaian pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Soon, he’s heading off to Chicago to collaborate with African-American artist Theaster Gates.
Working with others suits him. “I’m not a solitary artist, but part of a community and I have a vision of art that can effect change rather than being about producing beautiful commodities for sale on the market. Perhaps that distinguishes my work – it departs from the European tradition.” He suggests, too, that being raised in a polygamous family – he has several mothers and fathers and several hundred siblings – made him become an artist favouring collaboration. Is he married himself? “No, not yet and no children either,” he says, waving a hand before this installation as if to suggest that his children are all around us.
“Everything here bears the residue of history,” says Mahama. “My interest comes from the workers who made these seats and the people who used these trains to get to work. Their labour haunts the seats.”
Many of the things that Mahama gleefully collects from scrap dealers, school teachers and railway managers carry the sweat, grease, smells and even hopes of the past. As we chat, though, a cleaner sprays and wipes the seats around us. Isn’t she erasing history?
“It’s a health and safety question,” says Mahama. “The dust needs to be removed. But otherwise the residue is there.” I ask if he’s heard of object oriented ontology, the transhuman philosophy that rejects the privileging of human existence over the existence of nonhuman objects and urges us to have have solidarity with non-humans – not just with charismatic megafauna such as lions, but algae, cutlery, rocks. “I haven’t but it sounds worth thinking about.” The parliamentarians are not just the humans who will sit in these seats, but also the distressed old things that make up the installation. As curator Dominique Heyse-Moore puts it, “in their fatigued state they speak, too. They have journeyed across continents and around Ghana, witnesses to innumerable lives, and now to us here in Manchester.”
It is as though he’s uprooted the colonial infrastructure and returned it to the land of the oppressors. Like the locomotives and carriages from which Mahama salvaged them, these seats were probably made in Manchester or Leeds.
The Parliament of Ghosts echoes Mike Nelson’s The Asset Strippers, currently on show at Tate Britain, which consists of objects from the postwar Britain that framed his childhood – enormous knitting machines, woodwork stripped from a former army barracks, graffitied steel awnings and doors from an NHS hospital. Mahama’s installation has a similar nostalgia, though in his case it is a nostalgia for a time before he was born. Now 32, Mahama is too young to have witnessed the heady early days of days of Ghanaian independence, when the country’s first president Kwame Nkrumah sought to make his proud, independent nation economically self-supporting. Following a coup in 1966, the ruins of that great national dream remained littered around Ghana, as the nation struggled under military rule and globalised neoliberal economic orthodoxy.
“All around Ghana, you will see tall silos built in modernist style from concrete in the late 1950s by the Cocoa Processing Company to store cocoa. They were symbols of the new Ghana’s self-determination.”
Today these examples of so-called “freedom architecture” lie derelict, still dominating towns and villages, but sad monuments to crushed features. No wonder Mahama is intrigued by them, photographing them and building replicas that figure in his exhibition. As with the abandoned rolling stock of Ghana Railways, these silos speak of failure and ruin. Is his art melancholic? “Yes, but at the same time the silos contain vast potential. That is the dialectic in my art – they contain potential and yet are in a state of collapse. For me, as an artist, hope and failure have a common premise.”
As we stroll around the exhibition, a voice narrates parliamentary speeches from the 1960s. You don’t have to be Ghanaian to get caught up in these speeches’ heady dreams for building a new nation free from British rule.
Mahama is best known for his work draping buildings in patchwork quilts of old jute sacks, as if he were a Ghanaian equivalent to the celebrated wrap artist Christo. But, really, there is more going on. “I used jute sacks because for me the history of crisis and failure is absorbed into the material. Their history speaks of how global transactions and capitalist structures work. And because how their humbleness contrasts with the monumentality of the buildings they cover.” Recently he used the sacks to replace the flags outside the United Nations’ headquarters in New York – a reminder, he suggests, of “the history of labour and trade underlying our global condition”.
Jute sacks are ubiquitous in Ghana. Made in south-east Asia, they are imported to transport cocoa beans but then get repurposed to transport food, charcoal and other commodities. “They even become money, used to buy other commodities,” Mahama says. He takes part in this unofficial economy by exchanging new sacks for old in order to get hold of the historical residues in the fabric of the sacks. “People think I am very odd,” he says with a laugh.
I tell Mahama he reminds me of Walter Benjamin, the Jewish German philosopher who collected worthless, trashy consumer goods that seemed to promise utopia but became obsolete. “Yes, he means a lot to me. As do all those great Marxist thinkers I studied – Benjamin, Rancière, Marx himself.”
After acquiring these old sacks, he and a huge team of collaborators painstakingly sew them together into quilts as much as 70 metres wide. One critic compared this work to the process of holding together the patchwork nation of many ethnicities in the postcolonial era. For Mahama’s 2015 project Exchange Exchanger, he draped multiple buildings: the abandoned Food Distribution Corporation building in Accra; Ghana’s national theatre; a six-storey building that was going to be a bank but has lain abandoned for a decade; a squatted, half-finished apartment block. “My hope is that a father will be walking with his son one evening and talk about what they see.”
During this extraordinarily laborious collaborative project, Mahama found himself explaining what he was up to with a baffled cane-maker in an Accra market. It was then he had an epiphany. “He told me the story he heard as a child of a magician who wrapped a stick with a large piece of paper. And then he asked what the object was. Stick? Paper? Both? Neither? Nobody could get it quite right because, the magician said, the object had a completely different life because of the fragments collected from both stick and paper. This was a revelation to me because it made me think of time in my work – how it extends forwards and backwards. The objects I use in my work carry the past and the future, too.”
In the third and final room, we time travel to Mahama’s past to look at two paintings he made as a student at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in the early years of this decade and resolved never to show. They are composed from industrially printed textiles. Some were made nearby at the ABC Wax Factory outside Manchester. But not all: others were handmade in northern Ghana.
Why did he change his mind about showing these paintings in public? “I think, after the Parliament and all the archive material, this room is a very powerful contrast.” It is, too: the giddy colours are a delight. But, as so often with Mahama’s work, there’s more to it than aesthetics. He exchanged these textiles with women who worked sewing his jute sacks, some of which had been used as clothes, baby carriers and bags before being repurposed as art.
Mahama tells me that these clothes are passed down the generations and that to wash them is to break the chain of familiarity to a family. Fashion designer Stella McCartney recently told the Observer that clothes should never be washed, but the dirt brushed off. Mahama has a similar thought, though he would baulk at brushing the dirt of the past from the found objects he uses in his art. “They bear our hopes for the future. So we must treat them with care.”
• Parliament of Ghosts is at the Whitworth, Manchester, until 29 September.
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