Ibrahim Mahama

Résumé du livre

"Ibrahim Mahama was born in Tamale in the north of Ghana in 1987 and lives and works there in a complex of buildings he has built or renovated and opens to the public for seven days a week. He believes in the power of materials to embody individual, collective and political memory, and in the social responsibility of the artist to make art that instigates change. Songs about Roses is titled for a protest song by Scottish band Owl John in which Scott Hutchinson sings of the importance of art that stands up against wrong in the world. It is Ibrahim Mahama's first monograph and includes work made since 1992, culminating in a project for Fruitmarket Edinburgh in 2024 that includes sculptures, photographs, collages and videos inspired by the overlapping of Mahama's interest in the railway built by the British to transport gold and other commodities out of the then Gold Coast in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the warehouses that house Fruitmarket, built in the same era on steel columns above Edinburgh's Waverley railway station. With two hundred images, this book illustrates over thirty-five of Mahama's major works. Essays by curator aby Gaye-Dupare and artist Godileve Kasangati Kabena, both of whom have spent significant time with Mahama in Tamale, situate his work in intersecting international art-historical, theoretical, curatorial and post-colonial contexts, while a conversation between the artist and Fruitmarket Director Fiona Bradley grounds the work in his conviction that art is political as well as material. Finally, pages from Mahama's previously unpublished, ongoing Notes on Labour offer an insight into the beautiful, beguiling, urgent work of this internationally acclaimed artist."--