The Whitworth presents Ibrahim Mahama: Parliament of Ghosts (2019)

Parliament of Ghosts was first commissioned and produced for the Manchester International Festival at the Whitworth in 2019 and since then has continued as a body of work in progress with the communities of Tamale, Ibrahim Mahama’s home city in the north of Ghana.

The work reflects on the half-forgotten history of Ghana, whose journey from British colony to independent nation was completed barely 60 years ago. At the heart of the original three room installation, was the Parliament of Ghosts, a haunting assemblage of lost objects, rescued and repurposed to form a vast parliamentary chamber in the heart of the Whitworth. Made from abandoned train seats and faded railway sleepers, scrapped school furniture and documents from governmental archives: the Parliament is a dense material history of colonial infrastructure, reflected back to us today. It lends a powerful new context to this residue from a nation in transition. Alongside the central structure were an archive, paintings, sculpture, photography and film, speaking of the histories and memories of a country and its people asserting their independence.

The gallery space here on theVOV shows a selection of this evocative work, including the series of seven films called ‘The Parliamentary Debate’, originally shown within a reconstruction of grain silo. In the late 1950s concrete silos like this, intended for the Cocoa Processing Company, were built across numerous sites in Ghana, all from the same drawings. Because of the political conditions of the mid 1960s they have never been used. Overlooked as insignificant or obsolete structures, Mahama proposes that they have always contained something: potential.

In these films from the silo you can hear proposals from 1960s parliamentary papers read over the sound of salvaged components being broken down and made into new things at Accra’s Agbogbloshie market, the largest e-waste site in the world. The footage was been taken across Ghana over several years. The activities you see are broken down into the simplest components of labour, skill, tools and mending, potentially political gestures of making things anew.

The paintings were begun in 2012 using textiles as their principle material. They are precursors to the monumental jute sacking works for which Mahama has become internationally known over the last six years. The textiles are mostly wax prints industrially printed in Holland, China, Ghana and some in England at the ABC Wax factory that once operated near Manchester. Often exchanged with the women who stitch together the jute sacking works, they are their clothes, bags and baby carriers, bringing together the body and the commodity in this work.

Mahama also incorporates strip-woven textiles, hand made in the north of Ghana, which were eventually worn as a symbol of national unity after Independence. These come with the same accumulation of history found in all of Mahama’s materials. Passed down generations, he says that to wash them breaks the chain of unique familiarity to a family. Many of the collaborators with whom Mahama makes his work have travelled from rural communities in the north of Ghana, where the artist was born, to find labouring work in the cities in the south. They often tattoo themselves with their names and relatives in case they are hurt or killed in the many accidents on the roads or at work.

The photographs show the historic colonial maps and decayed leather train linings of the terrain they travel across, their tattooed arms summarise the labour conditions they experience. There are more than 70 different ethnic groups within Ghana, each with their own language, and many more distinct dialects within these. These identities have been fragmented by colonial and labour history.

Mahama is interested in looking at the trauma and chaos of these current conditions to find new openings. The money generated by his art is being used to reverse the process of migration in Tamale: with communal building projects and development of land for living and agriculture so his collaborators have an opportunity to return home. The material of Parliament of Ghosts was returned to Tamale after the exhibition and is currently being built there anew, to form a central civic space to be used for meeting and debate as they forge a new future.

Virtual Tour with Director, Alistair Hudson, and Dominique Heyse-Moore, Senior Curator at The Whitworth

Join Alistair Hudson and Dominique Heyse-Moore, as they take us on a tour of theVOV's presentation of The Whitworth's virtual exhibition Ibrahim Mahama: Parliament of Ghosts.

Art, Architecture and Community: Ibrahim Mahama, Sumayya Vally and the Whitworth Art Gallery

theVOV is joined by Artist Ibrahim Mahama, Architect Sumayya Vally, Alistair Hudson Director of The Whitworth and Senior Curator at the Whitworth Dominique Heyse-Moore, as they explore the ways in which we interact with art and architecture and the potential of designed spaces as catalysts for social engagement. Moderated by Director of The Whitworth and Manchester Art Gallery, Alistair Hudson.

Renowned artist Ibrahim Mahama will join live from his Parliament of Ghosts in Tamale, Ghana which was the centre-point of the Whitworth’s exhibition on the artist as part of the Manchester International Festival 2019.

Sumayya Vally (b. 1990, South Africa) carries obsession for Johannesburg and her work around narrative, identity and memory in the city have admitted her into a host of conceptual and investigatory projects, including a position as assistant curator and film producer for La Biennale di Venezia 2014 (South African Pavilion). Sumayya has recently been selected as a finalist (top 3) for the Civitella Ranieri Foundation architecture residency prize (2019) and was a finalist for the Rolex Mentorship and Protege award (2018/2019). She was recently named to the TIME100 Next list celebrating as one the world’s leaders primed to shape the future.

Sumayya’s design, research and pedagogical practice is committed to finding expression for hybrid identities and contested territories. She is in love with Johannesburg. It serves as her laboratory for finding speculative histories, futures, archaeologies, and design languages; with the intent to reveal the invisible. Her work is often forensic, and draws on performance, the supernatural, the wayward and the overlooked as generative places of history and work. She is presently based between Johannesburg and London as the lead designer for the Serpentine Pavilion 2020/1.

Dominique Heyse-Moore is Acting Head of Exhibitions and Collections at the Whitworth, The University of Manchester. She works across the programme and collection, with particular responsibility for textiles and wallpaper, with a focus on decolonisation activities. Dominique was lead curator of Ibrahim Mahama’s Parliament of Ghosts exhibition at the Whitworth in 2019, co-commissioned with Manchester International Festival.

Alistair Hudson was appointed Director of The Whitworth and Manchester Art Galleries in 2018. Here he is developing a new vision and mission based on the history of these institutions and their social imperative.From 2014 to 2018 he was director of MIMA, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, where he implemented a vision based on the concept of the Useful Museum, as an institution dedicated to the promotion of art as a tool for education and social change. For the preceding ten years he was Deputy Director of Grizedale Arts in Coniston in the Lake District, which gained critical acclaim for its radical approaches to working with artists and communities, based on the idea that art should be useful and not just an object of contemplation.He is co-director of the Asociación de Arte Útil with the artist Tania Bruguera – an expansive international project and online archive.