Visitors to the Barbican centre in London will see swathes of pink and purple across the building this spring rather than the usual concrete exterior thanks to the Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama.
His large-scale public art piece, Purple Hibiscus—made of 2,000 square metres of woven cloth—covers the lakeside façade of the brutalist structure, creating a vivid contrast against the grey building and sky.
The work was sewn together by more than 1,000 weavers and seamstresses at the Aliu Mahama sports stadium in Tamale, Ghana (an accompanying film gives an idea of the scale of the work, showing a plethora of craftspeople knitting the piece together on the football pitch).
“The period for the commission was quite short—roughly seven months to produce the entire work so we had to get a lot of people in order to get the work. I had to rent the stadium also; the days when they weren’t playing football games, we were playing [art] games!” Mahama tells The Art Newspaper, outlining how the commission helped bolster the local economy. “There is a lot of unemployment; we had to use the money that came from the commission to pay these people over seven months.”
When the work is deinstalled in August, the entire piece will go back to Ghana. “There are certain projects I did such as the National Theatre [the venue in Accra was covered in a blanket of jute sacks]… so I think it might be interesting to use the material to wrap this building.”
sparked controversy after two collectors, and the artists Yto Barrada and Cian Dayrit, removed works from the show over the Barbican’s decision to cancel a talk on Palestine and the Holocaust.
Asked about the boycott, Mahama says: “I am coming from ground zero… a lot of these histories [linked to the Global South] are tied to debt and these debts all come back to Europe. I would say that we should have boycotted Europe a long time ago because the politics in Europe has put the Global South in a bad way [condition]… I want to further understand; art is not about withdrawal but about re-inserting yourself, even as problematic as things are, and then within that go much deeper into the politics.”
Mahama is having a moment; last month he won the inaugural Sam Gilliam Award, a prize created last year by Dia Art Foundation and the Sam Gilliam Foundation in honour of the late artist’s legacy (Mahama will receive US$75,000 and feature in a public programme at Dia in autumn of this year). Meanwhile, Mahama will present a new body of work at the Fruitmarket gallery in Edinburgh later this year (22 June-6 October).
“I always say that doctors repair the body, but artists fill the body with the soul. And in any society, art is the soul that drives it – to evolve in a more conscious way,”
