Ibrahim Mahama

Tickets available at tinyurl.com/3ct8ka75

The Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain is proud to present The Harvest Season, an exhibition on an unprecedented scale in France of Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama, accompanied by nine associate artists and collectives: Dorothy Akpene Amenuke, Gideon Appah, James Barnor, the Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise, Courage Dzidula Kpodo & Postbox Ghana, Zohra Opoku, Tjaša Rener, Feda Wardak.

"It is in the past that we can excavate the potential of the future. The future isn't something that just ‘exists' somewhere, it also lives in our past memories, in the form of unrealized futures."

—Ibrahim Mahama

For the Fondation Cartier, Ibrahim Mahama has imagined a living entity in resonance with the art centers he has founded in Tamale, northern Ghana. With the associate artists, he occupies all of the Fondation Cartier's new space, with site-specific works, along with new versions of a selection of his iconic installations.

Since its creation, the Fondation Cartier has emerged as a place of dialogue, experimentation, and artistic exploration, open to emerging hubs of contemporary creation and the voices that comprise them. In the 1990s, it played a pioneering role in the presentation of artists from the African continent. Following in these footsteps, The Harvest Season is Ibrahim Mahama's first major exhibition in Paris, for which he has invited nine artists and collectives to join him.

Ibrahim Mahama (b. 1987 in Tamale, Ghana) has gained international recognition with installations made from collected materials, archives, and fragments of industrial heritage, which he reactivates to shape new imaginaries. Since the 2010s, he has developed a body of work that explores Ghana's colonial and postcolonial legacies. Drawing on his country's industrial and commercial history, he explores the circulation of goods, the transmission of craftsmanship, and the preservation of heritage. His work also highlights political, social, and economic continuities and ruptures, with particular attention paid to infrastructure, traces of the past, and collective dynamics.

Conceived by Ibrahim Mahama with nine artists and collectives, all of whom have long-standing ties to him through collaborations, research, or exchanges, The Harvest Season is a natural continuation of such an approach. It references the three art centers established by the artist in Tamale, northern Ghana, from 2019 onward. Designed as spaces for creation and transmission, while being rooted in the local environment, these centers have contributed to the emergence of a network of independent cultural institutions on the African continent, where pedagogy plays a central role. Ibrahim Mahama's centers engage in dialogue with other such initiatives across Africa. These include doual'art in Douala, Cameroon; the Centre for Contemporary Art Lagos (CCA) in Nigeria; RAW Material Company in Dakar; and more recently the Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute in Kenya. All of these institutions have, each in their own way, invented new, sustainable models that engage and resonate with their environment. Echoing these initiatives, the exhibition takes an interest in the political, cultural, and social utopias formulated at the time of African independence in the 1950s and 1960s and seeks to reactivate these visions to question possible futures.

The Harvest Season suggests the gentle cycle of creation: from the sowing of ideas to the transmission of expertise through to harvesting the fruits of a collective engagement, all within a logic where history can feed the futures yet to be invented.