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2 Bodies of Evidence Ibrahim Mahama s first guerilla interventions were executed using sewn-together jute sacks in the market places of Ghana. Nowadays, his projects are massively collaborative and on a monumental scale, while he still remains faithful to this symbolically charged material. In a rare interview, Ric Bower spoke to him in Accra. Who could possibly forget the three tonnes of jute sacking, which had taken 70 unseen and unnamed collaborators hundreds of sweat-soaked hours to sew together, hanging along the 300m long corridor formed by the outer walls of the Arsenale, at the 56th Venice Biennale? Out of Bounds, the work of the twenty-eight year old Ghanaian artist, Ibrahim Mahama, formed a steep-sided chasm along which a steady flow of art lovers flowed during the seven month duration of the event. Venice was the centre of power in the Mediterranean for over half a millennium. The Arsenale the insurer of Venice s own trading wealth was therefore a particularly appropriate site for this intervention. Ships were being built on a production line at the Arsenale site at the rate of one a day, 500 years before Henry Ford caught onto the process. Mahama accumulates used sacks from Ghanaian market traders, offering them new ones in exchange. The sacks begin life with the Ghana Cocoa Board before being repurposed, countrywide, by charcoal sellers and traders. Once in the hands of the artist and his collaborators, the sacks become evidence for truths that economically stable communities might find somewhat uncomfortable. Amassed and recontextualised, the sacks constitute a formidable body of incriminating evidence. They are also a special kind of filthy; the kind that would defy even the most enthusiastic of soap powder challenges. Each sack is tattooed and patched with information pertaining to their humdrum, pre-artworld, commercial narratives. Implicit within their scarred surfaces are injustices, meted out on those who have used them by the monstrous imbalances that exist in global trading systems. Mahama demonstrates, through his practice, that integrity is not an easy thing to commodify. I began by asking him what he was working on at the moment. many collaborators involved in a project, are all sites of intervention, in the same way that the theatre and the newly built apartment block are in this current project. RB: Humanity is richly ingrained in the material you work with and in the processes inherent in the making of the works; but the art market is still dependant on the white cube, a space that is devoid of the human imprint. How can you, as a practitioner, intervene across this linear and closed vehicle for creative practice? IM: My point of entry to creative practice, in general, was one where there were no institutions to engage with and, for obvious reasons, there was, and is, no existing space that can physically contain the kind of a practice I was embarking on anyway. This absence, however, should be seen as an opportunity rather than a hindrance. RB: Can a practice like yours survive in a commercial environment? IM: When working with galleries, the work can, sometimes, become commercially successful. But I always tell them the same thing: I don t mind selling smaller works in galleries, but the only reason I am doing it is to enable the other projects that I am doing. RB: There must be a micro-economy that grows out of each production, then. I presume you work with the same people all the time? IM: No, many of the people I work with are in such a precarious position personally that they might be working with me one day and then gone the next. So with every project I have to start again, training people from scratch. This is an integral and important aspect of my practice. Every day, I am showing people how to sew or rearrange the objects we work with. I am not the kind of artist who is comfortable outsourcing projects. I feel the need to take responsibility for every aspect of a production; for responsibility is material for me to manipulate, in the same way that sacking is. There is no point to my production processes without that sense of inbuilt responsibility. Ibrahim Mahama: I am working on a collaboration with the National Theatre and Trasacco Estate Group in Accra. The timing of the whole thing has meant I have not had very long to pull everything together. The directors of the National Theatre recognised that my practice is essentially political and this influenced their decision for the intervention to coincide with Ghanaian Independence Day. We have come a long way since 1957 [independence from European Colonisation] My projects are acts of subtle revolution, because they seem fairly straightforward in nature. However, this fact can be easily overlooked. There is a theatricality to my whole process that suits working with a theatre; the idea of the theatre being just what happens inside the building is challenged. We have to account for the architecture, the history of the space and the relationship between the building and its surrounding bodies. The jute sacks, the events and activities, and the RB: So that is a difficulty that is built into the work itself and this difficulty highlights problems inherent in the wider labour market? IM: Yes. RB: You have mentioned in the past that you admire Santiago Sierra, 16

3 previous spread: Out of Bounds, Ibrahim Mahama, , installation, mixed media, 56th Venice Biennale, courtesy of the artist and A Palazzo Gallery, Photo: Fagot Koroviev this spread: Civil Aviation, Airport, Accra, Ghana, Ibrahim Mahama, installation, mixed media, 2014, courtesy of the artist following spread: Mallam Atta Market, Accra, Newtown, Ghana, Ibrahim Mahama, installation, mixed media, 2012, courtesy of the artist final spread: Malam Dodoo National Theatre , Ibrahim Mahama, installation, mixed media, 2014, courtesy of the artist

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5 but your practice seems more aesthetically tuned than his; is this an African thing, being able to give conceptually rigorous work a strong visual aesthetic? IM: No, I don t think it s an African thing. I tend to think about the work holistically, or in a universal sense. There is no separation, in my mind, between how my practice functions and how it looks. Comparisons have been made in the past between my work and Christo s. Formally there are obvious relationships that can be drawn, but it is a lazy comparison that does not take into account the motivations for, or processes involved in, the making the work. Jacques Rancière and Walter Benjamin talk about acts of production and the role of the author in those processes, and it is these motivations and acts that make up a core component of my finished work. The revolutionary teachings of karikacha seid ou, from the Department of Painting and Sculpture at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, have been instrumental in the development of ideas within my creative practice too. Most of the buildings I work with are modernist in origin; it is not a purely African thing. There is an agreement, a conversation that occurs between the existing architectural forms, their particular contexts and the forms rendered by the subsequent intervention. RB: Dressing in sackcloth is seen as an acknowledgment of shame. Are you shaming these buildings and spaces? IM: One of the things my work addresses is the failure of architecture in the late 20th and 21st centuries. Architects often take little account of the body, or the way bodies integrate with the spaces they construct. My worry is that in cities like Caracas, Lagos and Accra or in other places where there are large slums the state, rather than being a protagonist for the people, becomes an antagonist, by favouring gentrification over human welfare. I have inherited and grown up within this environment of failure, and as an artist I ask myself how I can take this failure and subvert it, how it might lead into change? Crisis and failure are points of departure for me. RB: Have you become a connoisseur of sacking? IM: Not just sacks, there are many objects that I collect. When buildings are demolished I collect debris from them the iron rods, window sections and other fragments of tropical modernist architecture to use in the construction of new spaces. RB: As an artist, I imagine you are impelled to take risks and therefore to deliberately court failure. How then do you navigate your practice when you are working with institutions, which, of course, expect unbridled success when they commission a project from you? relation to my work is because of how African art and other art forms outside the western canon have been read in the recent past. They have often been labelled as emerging from cultural necessity. I think there is a bigger picture than that, which should be taken into account. When considering the human condition, issues such as spirituality are just part of the whole; they are never the whole picture, in themselves. IM: When I am invited to make work by an institution, compromise inevitably becomes part of the process of the work s development. It is true, working with institutions, there is often very little room for failure. With an institution I am there to build something and there is a readymade audience who will see it. When I do an independent project, however, the audience, who I think of as actors, are inscribed within the materials and the architecture that go into the formation of the work. It is all very different when I choose a space myself in which to work from scratch and a particular group of collaborators to work with. RB: Is there a spiritual aspect to your practice? RB: A practice such as yours is so much about the first hand, complete experience of being there: that is in the space, with the smell of IM: No, there is not. The reason I brush off associations of spirituality in 22 the sacking, the experience of the scale of a shrouded building up close and the sound of the wind through the folds of jute. How can any of this ever be successfully represented for posterity? IM: The act of publication will become an important part of my practice. I collect narratives by making recordings and films and, as I go back over them in my archive, it gives me a better sense of what the practice is about. I have been interested in, and have explored through different media, these kinds of ideas since I was an undergraduate student. I have found from experience that, if I show work and then endeavour to represent it literally, it closes the conversation down. But when I set out to represent something that is, in itself, almost incomprehensible, then the reader has to, and usually will, make the required effort to engage with the work. Take the National Theatre in Accra, for instance; when it is clothed in my intervention and photographed from above, using a drone, it looks like a movie set or a spaceship that has landed and been covered, but it exudes the sense that it could still take 23 off at any time, that it is awaiting some kind of awakening. I am interested in the transformation that occurs when alternative means of representation are employed, and in the sense of expectation that this process of translation engenders. I think that Ghana, like many other arenas, can become a centre for this kind of practice and I am greatly encouraged by the development of new spaces here: blaxtarlines in Kumasi is a fine example. At heart though, I am still a hardcore exponent of independent practice, of just getting things done CCQ