Fondation Cartier, Paris
Ibrahim Mahama put an entire factory in this exhibition exploring Ghana before and after it was ripped to shreds by colonialism. And it’s just one dazzling installation in a show full of hope
Ibrahim Mahama has dug through the ruins of post-colonial Ghana, sorted through the ashes of its ancient history, picked through the industrial detritus, the corporate waste, the piles of rubbish, and found something pretty unique: hope.
Sit on one of the Asante stools in his circular Parliament of Ghosts and you can almost feel a new future being worked out right in front of you. It’s the first installation in this huge exhibition at the Fondation Cartier in Paris, and it sums Mahama up pretty neatly. He’s looking at the collapse of the Ghanaian government in 1966, the way the hope of the post-colonial project was crushed in a military coup, and he’s looking at ancient Ghanaian history, at the empires that fell centuries ago and the way colonialism tore them to shreds. But he’s not lamenting any of them. He’s not mourning. Instead, he’s reclaiming them, asking how things can be rebuilt, how we can move forwards by learning from the past.