The character arc of Ibrahim Mahama

Who is Ibrahim Mahama?

He buys the sacks nobody wants. Then he covers a building in them.

He was born in Tamale, the ninth of ten siblings in a large family, and he says growing up in it is what taught him to work with other people and to see how different worlds connect. His grandfather lived in a car repair shop in Accra. His father was a civil engineer and a road contractor, and that is where the interest in industrial materials and the systems of labour started. He went to boarding school from the age of five to twelve, then two years at a Catholic school, then a boarding school for secondary. He chose visual arts there, encouraged by his father.

He studied fine art at a university in Kumasi, taking a bachelor's in painting in 2010, a master's in painting and sculpture in 2013, and a doctorate in fine art in 2015. While he was there he became interested in how materials carry memory: found objects, jute sacks, wood and metal that hold the movement of goods and labour across borders. His early installations, stitched together from sacks, were shown at a market in Accra, on a university building and at a railway station.

The sacks are the thing he is known for. They are stamped as a product of Ghana and were used to carry cocoa and charcoal, the country's trade, and they come to him by exchange with markets and workers, carrying the traders' names and the marks of everything they had already done. They get stitched together by hand, with artisans, technicians and traders, into tapestries big enough to drape a building. He has covered a university, a railway station, a national theatre, museums in Copenhagen and Tel Aviv and Cape Town, and the Barbican in London.

In 2015 he wrapped two walls of the Arsenale in Venice for a work called Out of Bounds, and that was the turning point: the gallery that represents him found him there, and a magazine later placed the work among the twenty five best of the century. He showed at Documenta in 2017, replaced fifty of the flags at Rockefeller Center with hand stitched jute ones in 2019, and represented Ghana in its first national pavilion that year as the youngest artist in it. He has said he uses crisis and failure as the primary material in his work.

The other half of the practice is building things in Tamale. An art space and research hub with fifteen residency rooms opened in March 2019. A studio and learning space made of local red clay brick followed in 2020, with warehouses, exhibition halls, old railway carriages and six Soviet era aeroplanes converted into libraries, cinema rooms and classrooms, and two thousand schoolchildren a week coming through for free workshops in robotics, solar energy, drone piloting and coding. A third space, in an abandoned grain silo complex, opened in 2022. On 18 February 2026 repairs on a vintage train at the studio caused a fire that destroyed it. On why he stays, he has been plain: it is very important not to leave Ghana.

The moments

Ibrahim Mahama's timeline.

In his words

Quotes by Ibrahim Mahama

Ibrahim Mahama: frequently asked questions

What people ask about his line.

Sources

• Ibrahim Mahama, English Wikipedia biography.
• Venice Biennale records for Out of Bounds, 2015, and the Ghana pavilion, 2019.
• ArtReview Power 100 listings, 2021 to 2025.
• Records of the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art, Red Clay Studio and Nkrumah Voli-ni, Tamale.
• Reporting of the fire at Red Clay Studio, 18 February 2026.
• No Wikiquote page exists for him, so the quotations below are taken from the record above.
• Mahama, on his practice.
• Mahama, on why he works from Tamale.
• Mahama, on architecture in his work.