Sekondi Locomotive Workshop, Ibrahim Mahama (2024) (EMPIRE LINES x Fruitmarket, White Cube)

Artist Ibrahim Mahama ‘time travels’ between British colonial and independent Ghana, tracing railway lines across African and European countries in the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in the 20th century.

Ibrahim Mahama is well-known for his large-scale, site-specific installations that speak to the local effects of colonialism, migration, and global economics. Working in Tamale, Kumasi, and Accra, Ghana, he often works with found materials, collected from abandoned places of pre- and post-independence production. Spanning what was then known as the Gold Coast, the Sekondi Locomotive Workshop was built by the British in 1923, to extract and transport resources like cocoa and minerals, the foundations of European colonial wealth and contemporary capitalism. With charcoal and ink drawings, sculptures and film, Ibrahim connects the histories, legacies, and labourers of this now disused railway back to the UK - layering them atop Waverley, one of the nation’s busiest train stations, for his first exhibition in Scotland.

With Ibrahim’s jute sack textile installations, we discuss shared practices of reuse, repurpose, and recycle with El Anatsui, an inspiration from an older generation who is also exhibiting for the first time in the city of Edinburgh. He shares photographs, personal letters, stamps from his archive, highlighting the respect shown to West African leaders like Kwame Nkrumah in countries of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), especially socialist Yugoslavia.

Using train carriages as sculptures, galleries, and classrooms back in Tamale, Ibrahim reconstructs Ghana’s colonial past to build its future, reversing flows of trade and migration to Africa. We discuss the potential and ‘charge’ within these materials which, like bodies, carry lived experience and knowledge, and the complex relationship with lasting architectures and ‘rural cosmopolitanism’ in societies today. Ibrahim also shares his collaborations across African and diasporic communities, with craftspeople, weavers, and makers at his Red Clay Studio in northern Ghana, to artists like Anya Paintsil in Manchester.

Ibrahim Mahama: Songs about Roses runs at Fruitmarket in Edinburgh until 6 October 2024. A book launch and artist talk takes place on the penultimate day of the exhibition (the day before the exhibition closes).

A Spell of Good Things opens at White Cube New York on 5 September 2024. Parliament of Ghosts (2019) continues online via the Whitworth, theVOV, and Vortic Art. And Purple Hibiscus, part of Unravel: The Power & Politics of Textiles in Art, was installed at the Barbican in London through summer 2024.

Hear artist Serge Attukwei Clottey live at the Eden Project in Cornwall, on his family’s internal migration from Jamestown/Usshertown in British Accra, Ghana, to coastal La (Labadi), Afrogallonism, and his collaborative practice, uplifting his community with upcycled plastic waste, through Noko Y3 Dzen (There’s Something in the World) (2018–Now): pod.link/1533637675/episode/8093f81c6a2eaaf7589bb73768e2a20c

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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