Ibrahim Mahama on Risk, Resilience and Rooting Art in Community

There is a particular courage required to build cultural institutions in places the global art world has largely overlooked. Ibrahim Mahama possesses it in abundance. During his Artist one on one conversation at Art Basel Paris, the Ghanaian artist spoke with Aby Gaye Duparc, curator of his first exhibition in Paris, ‘The Harvest Season’ at the Fondation Cartier, about the institutions he has founded in Tamale, northern Ghana, and the philosophy that underpins his approach to making art inseparable from community engagement.

The conversation revealed an artist unafraid of failure, or more precisely, someone who understands that the attempt itself carries profound value. “Even if it fails, at least we did give it a try,” Mahama reflected, a sentiment that speaks to the philosophy animating his work. Rather than treating art as something to be exported from the Global South to European capitals for validation, he has chosen instead to establish the infrastructure through which art can flourish where he is from, rooted in the soil of his own community.

Building Beyond the Canvas

What emerges from Mahama’s practice is a deliberate reimagining of what an artist’s role might be. Working with local communities has become not peripheral to his artistic practice but central to it. The institutions he has founded operate as spaces of cultural agency, permitting people in Tamale to participate in art making and art thinking on their own terms, rather than waiting for opportunities to arrive from elsewhere. This approach represents a quiet but radical refusal of extractive models that have long characterised relationships between Western institutions and artists from the African continent.

His exhibition at the Fondation Cartier, his first in Paris, represents a significant moment of recognition, yet it is telling that Mahama’s primary focus remains anchored to the work happening at home. The harvest season referenced in the title suggests cycles of cultivation and gathering, natural rhythms that perhaps parallel the patience required to build institutions and shift how art is valued and experienced. There is nothing hurried about his vision.

Through his conversation with Gaye Duparc at Art Basel Paris, Mahama articulated a model of artistic practice that privileges long term commitment to place and people over the transient nature of international art fair circuits. Yet here he was, present at one of the world’s most prestigious art gatherings, demonstrating that these approaches need not be mutually exclusive. Rather, they can coexist and reinforce one another, with global platforms amplifying rather than overshadowing the local work that remains the true centre of his vision.

Imagery courtesy of Art Basel (@artbasel).