<p>The 2023 artistic director uncovers Slovenia’s historical links to Ghana in old greenhouses and construction sites</p>

Cindy Sissokho

Artist Ibrahim Mahama is set to transform the Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts

<p><a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/30374/Ibrahim-Mahama?lang=en">Ibrahim Mahama</a>&nbsp;turns the old into the new. At 36, the Ghana-based artist has built an extraordinary career with his monumental installations made of found objects and his spectacular wall- and textile-based pieces, all of which repurpose existing material. With each piece, he proposes new economies and sites of knowledge production from and within Ghana. But this year, Mahama is expanding this practice and applying it to his role as Artistic Director of the 35th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts.</p>
<p>While the biennial traditionally hosts exhibitions in galleries and institutions throughout Ljubljana, Mahama’s vision is to rethink its format and spatiality by staging artworks and events in unconventional spaces. In this edition, works by over 50 local and international artists, including new commissions, will be spread across locations including a construction site and a greenhouse. Beyond proposing a new spatial presence, the biennial, titled ‘From the void came gifts of the cosmos’, will also address key transnational and historical legacies – as well as establish new contemporary ties – between Ghana and Slovenia.</p>
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<p>As an artist in Ghana, Mahama explains, he is ‘looking at all kinds of spaces – from cemeteries to forests, from old swimming pools to buildings.’ ‘I am a time traveler,’ he adds, ‘time is irrelevant, there are no boundaries to access an idea and the points from which to rethink what we produce<em>.</em>’ In Ljubljana, he took a similar approach, looking at various derelict spaces. It is important, he says, to convert such places into art spaces, ‘not necessarily to polish the buildings [but to work with] the residues and scars.’</p>
<p>Such markings are the physical legacies of histories, dotted around cities, buildings, monuments, and streets, that make up the architecture of the everyday. They map out individual and collective memories, ancestral and contemporary knowledge, and forms that have held space for political, economic, and environmental movements that inform today’s social structures. By highlighting those ‘residues and scars,’ which Mahama also refers to as ‘voids,’ in the context of Ljubljana, the artist works with forgotten narratives in history – histories that we can continue to learn from.</p>

<p>Such voids abound in Ljubljana, hinted at through the biennial’s title, and connect back to Ghana and the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY). Although an often-overlooked part of history, there was a strong political alliance and friendship between Kwame Nkrumah, who became the first President of Ghana in 1960, and Josip Broz, better known as ‘Tito,’ who led the SFRY from 1945 until his death in 1980. Both men were instrumental in the formation of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961. Created a year after the independence of Ghana, the revolutionary anti-colonial movement, to this day, gathers over 120 countries in a unified alliance that is neither against nor aligned with any major political powers. It was ‘a time when Nkrumah invited architects from Yugoslavia to build monuments in Ghana,’ Mahama explains. ‘Some of them have been lost or have disappeared, and others are still visible in the landscape. As a child, I encountered them without knowing of their history.’</p>
<p>Mahama bought one of the Yugoslavian-designed buildings in 2019 in Tamale, Ghana and transformed it into the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art. In 2021, he acquired a second space and turned it into the vast Red Clay studio complex, also near Tamale. Projects such as these, where educational programs are often held, are a significant part of Mahama’s artistic practice, which is rooted in pedagogy. </p>
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<p>Pedagogy is also a key concept for the biennial. During one of Mahama’s first visits to Ljubljana, he talked to art students in the city about his practice and his interest in the concept of the void. He also went with students to visit old building sites and together discuss the importance of rehabilitating and connecting to historical forms. When dealing with historical forms, the big question is, he says, ‘how to handle them and the materials they come with. The material residues are connected to economic forms and ties. In Ljubljana, this needed to be looked at on a much broader level.’</p>
<p>The occupation of alternative buildings for the biennial was thought about collectively. Mahama invited six curators – the collective Exit Frame, Alicia Knock, Selom Koffi Kudjie, Inga Lāce, Beya Othmani, and Patrick Nii Okanta – to engage with Ljubljana as curatorial collaborators. Exit Frame, one of Mahama’s long-term collaborators, is curating ‘Agyina: Advisory of Sages’<em>,</em> a program featuring film screenings, musical concerts, a conference, and more. Others on the team are overseeing new commissions by artists including the Ghanian filmmaker and researcher Anita Afonu and the Slovenian collective Nonument. Installations by such artists will be exhibited alongside works by local art students, whose projects the curators selected from an open call.</p>
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<p>With the biennial’s program, Mahama and his team embed historical events within spaces that define Ljubljana’s contemporary cityscape. And thinking beyond the biennial’s physical presence in Ljubljana, it is important to the artist that the themes addressed live on; in the newly produced commissions, in the lingering effects of collective and discursive events, and in the city itself through the unearthing of historical events within disused and alternative spaces. By establishing new relationships and forms that transcend the temporal and collective imaginaries of the exhibition itself, the artist and his collaborators’ ideas will transform forgotten geopolitical narratives into new and timely forms of solidarity.</p>
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<p>The 35th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts, ‘From the void came gifts of the cosmos’, will run from September 15, 2023 to January 14, 2024.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/30374/Ibrahim-Mahama?lang=en">Ibrahim Mahama</a> is represented by <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1316/White-Cube?lang=en">White Cube</a> (London, Hong Kong, New York, Seoul, West Palm Beach) and Apalazzo Gallery (Brescia, Italy).</p>
<p>Cindy Sissokho is a curator, cultural producer, art consultant, and writer with a specific focus on anticolonial, social, and political practices within the arts and culture. She currently works as a curator at the Wellcome Collection in London. She is also co-curator, with Céline Kopp, of the French Pavilion for the 2024 Venice Biennale which will be represented by artist Julien Creuzet. </p>
<p>Published on September 11, 2023.</p>
<p>Captions for full-bleed images:&nbsp;Ibrahim Mahama, 2022. Photo © Carlos Idun-Tawiah.</p>

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