Ibrahim Mahama
Zilijifa

A major new exhibition by Ibrahim Mahama (b. 1987, Tamale, Ghana) is installed across the first floor of the Kunsthalle’s Museumsquartier building. The exhibition presents an entirely new body of commissioned work including installation, photography and video for which Mahama draws upon the material legacy of colonialism, post-colonialism and industrialisation in Ghana. It is Mahama’s first solo exhibition in Austria.

Mahama’s exhibition at Kunsthalle Wien develops his research on the history of the Ghanaian railway network, first created under British colonial rule during the 1890s. It sees the fulfilment of a long-term aspiration to deconstruct, transport and exhibit a full-size diesel locomotive (one of several British- and German-built trains that Mahama has acquired since 2022). The mechanisms, vessels and networks employed in transporting goods and people are the starting point for a series of works that consider the act of loading, carrying and unloading weight alongside a more abstract notion of the weight of history. Remnants of the railway, an industrial system for transport and trade, are combined with objects and images that refer to the physical act of bearing weight with the body. The centrepiece to the exhibition is an installation that employs a multitude of enamelled iron ‘headpans’ to act as a support for a locomotive.

The pans are a commonplace vessel used in Ghana to carry goods and materials. Mahama amassed a collection of thousands of used pans, exchanging new for old. Chipped, rusted, dented and torn, the objects evidence heavy use. Stacked underneath the train, they bear a locomotive that can be seen as another kind of vessel.

An accompanying series of photographic works consider the damage inflicted upon the human body by the daily activity of carrying the headpans. These include over 100 X-ray images of spinal deformation that are framed within a metal scaffold removed from the train. At once a symbol of and a system for colonial and capitalist extraction, Mahama’s critique figures the railway as an infrastructure that was literally built on the backs of Ghanaian people.