Parliament of the Ghost : Excerpts of Ibrahim Mahama Interview with the Guardian News Paper
In Ghana it difficult to point to any junk store
where one can go get things which are not fit for purpose again, we also have
the habit of throwing away gadgets, books, furniture and more which are not fit
for purpose, generations to come would miss a lot if we are unable to preserve
some these things.
One man is doing the great and proud in the international world of art, his art is a unique such that he turns odd stuff to
new and brings them back to life.
Parliament of ghost exhibition, Ibrahim Mahama interview with Stuart Jeffries of the guardian.com
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| Parliament of the ghost |
‘We’re haunted all the time by ghosts of the past,”
says Ibrahim Mahama as we sit on dirty old plastic second-class Ghana Railways
carriage seats in Manchester’s Whitworth Art Gallery. Even these seats from an
abandoned railway?
Mahama, a junkyard utopian whose art involves
recycling stuff that’s lost its purpose, bought up rows and rows of these
seats. He packed them into shipping containers and sent them on a 5,000-mile the trip, from his west African homeland to the Whitworth, along with some school
cupboards no longer fit for purpose, exercise books of children now grown up,
and the minutes of Ghanaian parliamentary debates now deemed obsolete.
Then he arranged rows of seats into terraces, ringed
the seats with the cupboards, and filled their shelves with the books so that
intrigued visitors can thumb through them during the Manchester international festival. He’s also used the leather
from the first-class seats to bind albums of historic photographs from Ghana’s early
independence years. He calls the resulting installation Parliament of Ghosts.
Parliament of Ghosts seems to
critique many things – colonialism, Ghana’s past and Brexit, too. “Not everything is about Brexit,” he laughs. “But
sure. It’s about Brexit among other things. Ghana is very connected with
Britain even now. So why not Brexit?”
As we stroll around the exhibition, a voice narrates
parliamentary speeches from the 1960s. You don’t have to be Ghanaian to get
caught up in these speeches’ heady dreams for building a new nation free from
British rule.
During this extraordinarily
laborious collaborative project, Mahama found himself explaining what he was up
to with a baffled cane-maker in an Accra market. It was then he had an
epiphany. “He told me the story he heard as a child of a magician who wrapped a
stick with a large piece of paper. And then he asked what the object was.
Stick? Paper? Both? Neither? Nobody could get it quite right because, the
magician said, the object had a completely different life because of the
fragments collected from both stick and paper. This was a revelation to me
because it made me think of time in my work – how it extends forwards and
backwards. The objects I use in my work carry the past and the future, too.”
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