Ibrahim Mahama: Songs about Roses

At Fruitmarket, Edinburgh, the Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama (b.1987) presents a new body of work centred on railways. This subject-matter engages not only the gallery’s physical location above Waverley train station, but also the colonial connections between Ghana and the United Kingdom. In the early twentieth century, the British government constructed a railway network in Ghana, then a colony known as the Gold Coast, for the export of the country’s resources, including gold, cocoa and minerals. The railways fell into disuse following independence in 1957. Since the late 2010s Mahama has worked to acquire these derelict trains and tracks, largely from the Sekondi Locomotive Shed, the operational hub of the Ghana Railway Company. This material forms the basis of Mahama’s large-scale drawings, photographs and installation, which are shown across the lower and upper galleries and warehouse.

Hung opposite each other on the walls of the lower gallery are two large-scale charcoal drawings: Ghana Mann FIG.1 and My Dear Comfort FIG.2. Both works are collages of production orders from the paint division of the Ghana Industrial Holding Corporation, an organisation established in the 1950s to manage the transition of industries, including railways, from British to local management. Mahama draws directly onto these papers. In My Dear Comfort, which is formed of two large parts, the right-hand drawing depicts the outline of a train emblazoned with the words ‘750 HP DIESEL-ELECTRIC LOCOMOTIVE / FOR GOLD COAST RAILWAY / BUILT BY “ENGLISH ELECTRIC” PRESTON’. In Ghana Mann, Mahama works from semi-staged photographs – displayed in the upper gallery as a series titled 24 Tons of Silence FIG.3 – that show the arrival of train tracks at Red Clay, the artist’s studio and exhibition space in the northern Ghanaian city of Tamale. In addition to Red Clay, Mahama has opened two other contemporary art institutions nearby: the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art and Nkrumah Volini.

Mahama has a long-standing interest in detritus and decay, and more specifically in the transformation of abandoned objects associated with the colonial and post-independence era into active entities.¹ He became known in the 2010s for his large-scale jute sack installations draped over the exterior walls of buildings, and found international acclaim at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015 for Out of Bounds (2014–15), which followed the same format. To create these installations, Mahama sources jute sacks that are at the end of their life cycle. Imported from Southeast Asia, these sacks are used to transport cocoa across Ghana to the country’s southern ports before they find another life carrying grains, beans, vegetables and, finally, charcoal. In the 1950s cocoa was central to President Kwame Nkrumah’s vision of postcolonial Ghana, but it simultaneously sowed the seeds for the downfall of his government when the cash crop dropped in profit after independence.² For Mahama, these past failures spur creativity in the present.

Borrowed from Owl John, the solo project of the late Scottish musician Scott Hutchison, the exhibition title Songs about Roses captures this sense of constructive politics in the present. As Hutchison’s lyrics put it: ‘we don’t need songs about roses [. . .] Please sing me something new’. At Red Clay, Mahama displays the derelict trains to a local audience, some of whom have probably never seen them before, and for whom they can open up alternative imaginaries.³ The railway network constructed in Ghana by the British did not extend north; rather, they depended on labour from the north to build the railways in the south. In Ghana Mann, Mahama echoes the labour of these northern workers in the strength of the bare-chested men he depicts carrying the tracks on-site at Red Clay. Below the men a crowd push and pull the trains, emphasising their conceptual movement from past to present. Nearby, Buy When Death Sells FIG.4 FIG.5 – a series of one hundred Polaroid images that show the construction of Red Clay, all mounted on the same archival production orders as the charcoal drawings – offers another demonstration of the opportunities that can emerge from detritus.

The division between north and south Ghana is an ongoing concern in Mahama’s practice. At the far end of the lower gallery is a series of ten photographs taken in 2024 that capture the tattooed arms of women who have worked as the artist’s studio assistants FIG.6. Most of these women are migrants from the north who travel to the south in search of employment. Their tattoos, which include their names and birthplaces, allow them to be identified in case of accidents. Their arms are photographed against the interior wood and leather lining of the trains that Mahama has acquired, which are shown as wall-based works FIG.7 in the upper gallery, and are emblazoned with the names seen on the women’s arms. As such, Mahama marks the material world with the often invisible labour of these women. 

In the Fruitmarket’s warehouse space is Mahama’s installation SEKONDI LOCOMOTIVE WORKSHOP FIG.8, which similarly pays homage to railway staff who worked at Sekondi before Ghanaian independence. These men, who witnessed the extractions of the colonial government, became the most vocal advocates of independence. Based on group photographs, Mahama has executed life-size portraits on wooden cut-outs and mounted them to train tracks. The cut-outs are surrounded by a seven-channel video projection that shows Mahama’s collaborators in Sekondi and Accra collecting materials for his works of art. The installation is accompanied by a voiceover in which a young woman advocates for a youth parliament. There is a parallel between this woman and the railway staff: the endurance of a hopefulness associated with the independent nation.

In the upper gallery Mahama presents a third large-scale charcoal drawing, Ghana Mann Papapaaaa FIG.9, a triple portrait of the Ghanaian artist, intellectual and teacher kąrî’kạchä seid’ou, Professor in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi (KNUST), where Mahama studied. Over the past thirty years or so, seid’ou has worked with colleagues including Kwako Boafo Kissiedu, George Ampratwum, Edwin Bodjawah and Dorothy Amenuke to transform the department’s curriculum from its colonial origins and entanglement with the tourist market into one of the continent’s most innovative teaching programmes.⁴ seid’ou and his colleagues comprise a collective called blaxTARLINES, a name given retrospectively to themselves in 2015 to continue their mission of building and sustaining a contemporary art infrastructure in Ghana. 

Mahama’s interest in trains is intimately linked with the teachings of seid’ou and blaxTARLINES. Where KNUST graduates once painted a train for the tourist market, Mahama acquires the derelict train in its totality. A precedent for this action can be found in seid’ou’s Royal Palm painting project. In 1995 seid’ou, then an MA student, staged a durational performance and institutional critique in which he ‘defaced’ or painted gestural marks and abstract patterns on the sixty-eight royal palm trees lining the street that leads to KNUST’s central administration block.⁵ Notably, the Royal Palm painting project marked a break from the conventional genres of life drawing and painting to which students had previously been confined. Indeed, it is likely that the students produced images of palm trees for the tourist market. Although such images may have had a political message in the context of post-independence Ghana, they were often acquired by non-African foreigners who interpreted them as signs of an exotic and petrified tradition, an antithesis to Western modernity.⁶ Against this backdrop, seid’ou’s Royal Palm painting project transformed visual art from a commodity to gift. By taking the act of creation onto the street, he compelled an encounter between painting and an audience that would not typically seek out an experience with visual art.

At Fruitmarket, Mahama occasionally returns to these more conventional genres of artmaking as a way to disseminate his activities in Tamale. However, there is nothing conventional about Mahama’s approach. Looking at the artist’s earlier jute sack installations, there is a profound sense of absence. Torn, patched and marked by their previous owners, the jute sacks make audiences keenly aware of their earlier lives that cannot be easily accessed; there is a missing context. In a similar vein, Songs about Roses provides just a trace of the artist’s activities in Tamale. One can only access a fraction of the story from Edinburgh; the rest has to be found in Tamale. For Mahama’s practice is one of radical decentralisation.