The central room of Ibrahim Mahama’s textured and provocative installation transports you 5,000 miles, and then some. A space is created at the heart of Manchester’s Whitworth Art Gallery by tiered seats on four sides. The seats, in an unforgiving, utilitarian mushroom-coloured plastic, polished by countless backsides, each saw decades of service in the second-class carriages of Ghana’s railroad before Mahama shipped them here from the scrapyard. For the empty seats that was the last leg of a very long open-return journey: they were originally made in a factory either in Manchester or Leeds.
The émigré “ghost parliament” they now propose in the gallery is potent with debates: between their quiet, transplanted present and their rattling, storied past, between Britain and its former Gold Coast colony, between the repurposed port cities of Manchester and Accra, once twin engines of empire, and the people who lived and worked and died in them.
The seats have not travelled alone. They are surrounded in the gallery by an archive of evocative objects and documents that speak to a century of often thwarted hope in Mahama’s native country. The artist, 32, is a compulsive collector and trader in Accra’s markets and junkyards. His magpie eye is drawn to the detritus of his city’s dreams. Ghana, before and after independence in 1957, was the African nation most associated with the industrial revolution born in Manchester.
Mahama has assembled all the defunct maps and drawing-board plans and British machine tool manuals to prove it. They are stored and stacked in rows of battered wooden lockers and shelves, once also the property of the Gold Coast railway, many of them containing the scrawled names or pasted pictures and photographs and shoes and school books of generations of Ghanaian workers. They bring with them the smell of engine oil and old wood and red dust and sweat, an odour that carries you directly to the locomotive workshops and railway sidings and goods yards of west Africa.
In one of the side rooms to the “parliament”, Mahama, who has previously exhibited work at the Saatchi Gallery and White Cube as well as representing Ghana for the first time at this year’s Venice Biennale, presents a series of photographs of the strong, tattooed forearms of men who have travelled from the villages near where he grew up in northern Ghana to find work as labourers in the capital. The men tattoo their arms with their names and the contact details of their next of kin, in case they should be killed or injured in the many accidents on the road or on building sites.
Mahama’s artistic practice, based in his home town of Tamale in the north, has a utopian, community-building intent. Using funds from exhibiting and selling his art work internationally – in particular in recent years his monumental “tapestries” of jute sacking – he has been able to establish large-scale workshops in local abandoned warehouses, employing as collaborators local men and women who no longer need to travel to find employment, modelling a new kind of possibility. As in some of the former redbrick textile factories of Manchester, on a local scale art has stepped in to help re-energise spaces once occupied by industry.
The associations are not all sepia-tinged. In a raucous display of sudden colour, two walls of the Whitworth, beside the forearm photographs, are filled with vast murals made of fragments of stitched-together Ghanaian fabrics and clothing, designs that became symbolic of pan-African unity after independence. Some of them are from shirts and dresses that were strip-woven and hand-printed in local villages; others are reproduced in Europe on an industrial scale, including at the ABC wax factory that once operated in Manchester.
The other room in Mahama’s show directly imports the “freedom architecture” that followed independence. After 90 years of British colonial rule, independent Ghana under its feted hero Kwame Nkrumah carried the idealism of a continent. That radical potential was set in stone by Nkrumah’s government in a series of huge silos that were to form the basis of a homegrown cocoa processing industry, designed to unlock the value chain of the country’s primary cash crop and keep profits at home rather than shipping them to Europe – and using the proceeds to fire a modernised industrial economy.
Britain dashed these hopes by imposing punitive tariffs on imported processed cocoa products (as opposed to raw beans) to protect its own market. The silos were never used. Mahama has reconstructed the concrete footings of one of them here. It becomes a mini Imax theatre in which five films are shown in a loop. The films show workers in Accra’s Agbogbloshie market, the largest waste site in the world, repetitively remodelling the tin and wood and steel objects left behind by progress: bashing bowls and hammering crates by hand; trying to coax life into heavy, post-second world war machinery bearing nameplates from Coventry, Birmingham and Manchester.
The voiceover to this unedifying labour comes from 1950s Ghanaian parliamentary debates, delivered in BBC English, in which the urgency of unleashing the skills and potential of the nation’s youth is emphasised – with an irony that, in the context, still sounds pointedly possible as well as tragic.
Mahama’s show is the high point of the visual art offerings at this year’s Manchester international festival. The more obvious headline act is David Lynch, whose paintings occupy the gallery space at the arts complex Home, at which the director has also programmed a film season and a series of talks and concerts. Lynch’s paintings are somewhat self-conscious products of his edgy Hollyweird imagination: blunt illustrations to jolly-sounding fairy stories – “I was a teenage insect” or “Billy finds out he has shit for brains” – or little lithograph storyboards inked with his crafty off-the-shelf surrealism: “My head is disconnected” and so on. They are, for better and worse, precisely the pictures you would imagine Lynch to paint. Viewed after Mahama’s imported and richly external world, they represent less a twin peak than a moderately diverting foothill.
Star ratings (out of five)
Ibrahim Mahama ★★★★
David Lynch ★★
