Ibrahim Mahama valuation
Covers buildings in stitched jute sacks, turning the material of Ghana's commodity trade into vast installations.
Ibrahim Mahama was born in Tamale, Ghana, in 1987 and studied painting and sculpture at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi.
What a work by Ibrahim Mahama is worth
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Bio
Ibrahim Mahama was born in Tamale, Ghana, in 1987 and studied painting and sculpture at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi. He is best known for covering buildings, walls and whole public spaces with stitched jute sacks, the bags used to carry cocoa and charcoal through Ghana's export economy, made with teams of collaborators; he calls these works Occupations. Out of Bounds, at the Venice Biennale in 2015, wrapped the walls of the Arsenale, and he has since shown at documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel in 2017, in Ghana's first national pavilion at Venice in 2019, and at the Barbican in London in 2024. In Tamale he founded the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art, Red Clay Studio and Nkrumah Voli-ni, and in 2025 he topped ArtReview's Power 100, the first person from Africa to do so.
The installations are site-specific, so what comes to market is wall works of stitched jute, works on paper and objects, which have appeared at auction in recent years. Provenance through his galleries is usual.
Tamale, Venice and the Savannah Centre
His installation A Straight Line Through the Carcass of History has been shown in Athens, Kassel and New York, and in 2025 he received the Art Basel and UBS Artist of the Year award.
The Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art opened in Tamale in 2019 as an exhibition, research and education space for artists in northern Ghana.
KNUST, blaxTARLINES and White Cube
Mahama was the ninth of ten children; his father, a civil engineer and road contractor in Tamale, gave him an early interest in industrial materials. At KNUST he took a BFA in painting in 2010, an MFA in painting and sculpture in 2013 and a PhD in 2015, and he credits the teacher Kąrî'kạchä Seid'ou and the blaxTARLINES KUMASI collective, of which he is a member, with his idea of art as a gift to society. His first sack installations went up on the university building, at Kumasi railway station and in markets in Accra, and besides jute he has worked with train parts, shoe-shine boxes, sewing machines and school desks.
Out of Bounds was curated by Okwui Enwezor, and at that Biennale he met Susan May of White Cube, which has represented him since. Several exhibition titles come from African novels: Fragments, at White Cube London in 2017, from Ayi Kwei Armah; Half of a Yellow Sun, in Hong Kong in 2022, and Purple Hibiscus, at the Barbican, from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; and A Spell of Good Things, in New York in 2024, from Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀. His work is in the Centre Pompidou, LACMA and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and in 2026 he was made a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
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