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.

Biography

Ibrahim Mahama (b. 1987, Tamale, Ghana) has held exhibitions at Kunsthalle Bern (2025); Fruitmarket, Edinburgh; Barbican Centre, London (both 2024); Kunsthalle Osnabrück (2023); Frac des Pays de la Loire, Nantes (2022); University of Michigan Museum of Art (2020); The Whitworth, University of Manchester; Norval Foundation, Cape Town (both 2019); Tel Aviv Art Museum (2016) and K.N.U.S.T Museum, Kumasi (2013). His work has also been exhibited at the Sharjah Biennial 15 (2023); the 18th Biennale Architettura, Venice (2023); the 35th Bienal de São Paulo (2023); the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2021); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2020); the 22nd Biennale of Sydney (2020); the 58th and 56th Biennale Arte, Venice (2019 and 2015) and at Documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel (2017). He was the Artistic Director of the 35th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts (2023) and is the recipient of the inaugural Sam Gilliam Award from the Dia Art Foundation. Mahama lives and works in Accra, Kumasi and Tamale where he has founded several artist-led community initiatives including Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art (SCCA) in 2019, Redclay in 2020 and, most recently, Nkrumah Volini (all in Tamale).

Edition

On the occasion of his first solo exhibition in Austria, Ibrahim Mahama has created a limited-edition print, the proceeds of which will entirely support Kunsthalle Wien’s programme.