After ten years of close collaboration and a multitude of extraordinary projects together, APALAZZOGALLERY is delighted to present Ibrahim Mahama’s new solo exhibition, If these are the things.
Mahama’s artistic practice is characterised by the use of salvaged materials – paper documents, jute sacks, sewing machines and old doors – which the artist manipulates and transforms to explore themes such as labour exploitation, the phenomenon of migration and the circulation of goods. As Mahama has repeatedly explained, “I am interested in how crisis and failure are absorbed into materials with strong references to global transition and the functioning of capitalist structures.”
The exhibition, the artist’s fourth solo show with the gallery, features a rich body of previously unseen work, combining charcoal drawings, photographs and a monumental installation consisting of fragments of old painted plywood ceilings and wooden doors. In its grandeur, the latter recalls the famous series Non-Orientable Nkansa II. 1901–2030 (2016), made in the studio in Tamale in collaboration with SCCA, using hundreds of cobbler boxes – small wooden objects used to hold tools for polishing and mending shoes. The works on display immortalise athletic young men holding pieces of track with no more than the strength of their own arms or trying to move obsolete and rusty carriages. What they seem to bear is not so much a physical weight as a symbolic one.
