World’s Most Influential Artist, Ghana’s Ibrahim Mahama, Turns Discarded Materials into Powerful Art
Ibrahim Mahama’s installations examine the human cost of global trade, and his Red Clay Studio in Tamale preserves Ghana’s industrial and cultural history.
In 2025, the influential art magazine ArtReview ranked Ibrahim Mahama first on its Power 100 list, naming him the most influential person in the art world — the first African to hold that position. Born in 1987 in Tamale, northern Ghana, Mahama works with what the world discards: jute sacks that once carried cocoa and charcoal, scrap metal, worn documents, decommissioned trains and even aircraft. In his vast installations, sacks draped over museums and ministries become monuments to labour, trade and the enduring legacy of colonialism in Africa’s economies.
Ibrahim Mahama’s installation Out of Bounds covered a passage at Venice Biennale’s with used jute cacao sacks. Each sack is a physical record of the economy it has travelled through. The stains and repairs make otherwise invisible labour visible. They represent the people who filled, carried and emptied the sacks — people whose work makes international trade possible. The inequality lies in the contrast between the global movement of valuable commodities and the circumstances of those handling them. Mahama’s interest began while waiting at Ghana’s border: He wondered why trucks carrying goods could cross borders more easily than people.
In northern Ghana Mahama has build Red Clay Studio, a campus build from red clay brick and filled with repurposed planes and colonial era trains. He is concerned about the destruction of a people’s relationship with their history, material culture and capacity to pass these on. Red Clay creates a collective inheritance that children can live with. Through everyday familiarity, those materials become part of their understanding of where they come from and what they can imagine for themselves. The campus spans some 200 acres and runs from the proceeds of the sales of his art works to Western museums and collectors.
This installation employs a multitude of enamelled iron ‘headpans’ to act as a support for a locomotive from the Ghanaian railway. Remnants of the railway, an industrial system for transport and trade created under British colonial rule, are combined with objects and images that refer to the physical act of bearing weight with the body. The pans are a commonplace vessel used in Ghana to carry goods and materials. Mahama’s critique figures the railway as an infrastructure that was literally built on the backs of Ghanaian people.
The photos depict the tattooed forearms of Ghanaian migrant workers who collaborated with Mahama, photographed against British colonial maps. The tattoos are not decorative. They record names, places of origin and sometimes family information. They serve as a form of identification for people without official documentation, including in circumstances where a worker is injured or killed. The work is really about the body as a personal archive and the colonial map as an instrument of administrative power. The photographs bring these two ways of recording identity and belonging into direct confrontation.
Red Clay studio in northern Ghana. Mahama: “In Tamale, where I was born, up until the last five to ten years, there was never any relationship with contemporary art within the city. I thought that it was very important, because it’s not just good enough for an artist to make a work of art or an installation. When it comes to the question how people, especially young people and children, understand their relationship to African contemporary art, and the critical discourse that is within it, it is sometimes almost zero to none. We cannot talk about justice when the question of justice is still somehow tied to a certain kind of colonial history.”
Installation of Xrays of Ghanian laborers. They make visible what precarious work and unequal living conditions have done to these bodies. The global economic system is registered inside people: In injuries, damage and accumulated wear, according to Mahama. We cannot identify the person or their geographical origin, but we can see the harm they carry. That anonymity allows the individual injuries to speak to wider conditions of exploitation.
Mahama’s work engages with the legacy of Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, and the ambitions of the post-independence period (1957-1966). Sixty years after the coup of February 24, 1966, which extinguished some of this momentum, the artist revisits the narratives, ruins, and infrastructures to explore unfulfilled promises and give rise to new forms. It is in this spirit that he founded Red Clay Studio in Tamale, a rural region in northern Ghana. The art centre is dedicated to creation, heritage preservation, and the transmission of expertise to younger generations.
Parliament of Ghosts is an installation, which takes the form of a parliamentary chamber and is made from traditional Asante wooden stools on which visitors are invited to sit. The work reflects Ibrahim Mahama’s collective and living practice that shapes the present by creating spaces of life and potential from ancient materials. Emptied of its representatives, this “ghost” parliament acts as a metaphor for a failed democracy, an allusion to the1966 coup in Ghana and the dissolution of the government. Here, the artist invents a politics based on absence and potential that calls forth the ghosts of institutions that failed or never even existed.
Things Fall Apart is a brand-new installation created for the Fondation Cartier in Paris. While Mahama was preparing for this show, he learned that the Aboso Glass Factory in southern Ghana was about to be scrapped. President Nkrumah had opened the bottle-manufacturing plant in 1966, just weeks before he was deposed. “I thought, wouldn’t it be interesting if we used the capital that was coming from the Fondation Cartier to acquire this factory, and then rebuild a section of it here in Paris, but also rebuild it in the Red Clay studio as a new public space that allows us to be able to reflect on these histories? So we did.”
What does the world throw away — and what stories do those discarded things carry?
For Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama, the answer lies in the sacks, scrap metal, abandoned trains and industrial ruins that tell the story of Africa’s labour, trade and colonial past. Mahama’s greatest work may be happening back home in northern Ghana, where he is building a legacy — transforming forgotten histories into spaces of learning, cultural pride and possibility for future generations. This is the story of an artist turning Africa’s discarded materials into a powerful conversation about its past, present and future.