Ibrahim Mahama: Parliament of Ghosts; David Lynch: My head is disconnected – opinion | Art and design

Tit central room of Ibrahim MahamaThe textured and provocative installation transports you 5,000 km, and more. A space is created in the heart of the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester by seating on four sides. The seats, made of mushroom-colored plastic, ruthless and ruthless, polished by innumerable setbacks, each served for decades in Ghana's second-clbad railway cars before Mahama shipped them here from the scrap. For empty seats, this was the last leg of a very long round trip: they were originally manufactured in a factory in Manchester or Leeds.

The "ghost parliament" they now present in the gallery is the subject of much debate: between their silent and transplanted present and their heartbreaking past, between Britain and its former Gold Coast settlement, between the converted port cities of Manchester and Accra, once two engines of the empire, and the people who lived and worked and died in them.

The seats did not travel alone. They are surrounded in the gallery by an archive of evocative objects and documents evoking a century of hope often thwarted in the homeland of Mahama. The 32-year-old artist is a collector and a compulsive trader in the markets and wineries in Accra. His eye is attracted by the detritus of dreams of his city. Ghana, before and after independence in 1957, was the African country most badociated with the industrial revolution born in Manchester.

Mahama has collected all the maps, drawing table plans and British machine tool manuals to prove it. They are stored and stacked in rows of used wood racks and shelves, formerly also owned by the Gold Coast Railway, mostly containing scribbled names or pictures and pasted photographs, as well as shoes and schoolbooks of generations of Ghanaian workers. They bring with them a smell of engine oil, old wood, red dust and sweat, an odor that transports you directly to locomotive workshops, sidings and cargo yards in Africa. Where is.

Mahama, who has already exhibited at the Saatchi Gallery and the White Cube and is representing Ghana for the first time at this year's Venice Biennale, presents a series of photographs of tattooed men's forearms from villages close to his home region where he grew up to find work as laborers in the capital. The men tattoo their arms with their names and the details of their close relatives, in case they are killed or injured in the many accidents that occur on the road or on construction sites.

The artistic practice of Mahama, based in her hometown of Tamale, in the north of the country, has a utopian and community purpose. Using funds from the exhibition and sale of his works of art internationally – particularly in recent years from his monumental "tapestries" of jute-sacking – he has been able to establish large-scale workshops in local abandoned warehouses, employing as collaborators men and women who need to travel to find a job, modeling a new type of opportunity. As in some of Manchester 's old red brick textile factories, local art works have taken place to revitalize spaces once occupied by the industry.

The badociations are not all separated from each other. In a spark of sudden colors, the walls of the Whitworth, next to the photographs of the forearm, are filled with vast murals made from Ghanaian fabric fragments and garments sewn, designs that have become the symbol of the Pan-African unit after independence. Some of them come from shirts and dresses woven in strips and hand-printed in local villages; others are replicated in Europe on an industrial scale, including in the ABC wax factory that was once in operation in Manchester.

The other piece of Mahama's show directly imports the "architecture of freedom" that followed independence. After 90 years of British colonial rule, independent Ghana, led by its famous hero, Kwame Nkrumah, carried the idealism of a continent. The Nkrumah government has put this radiant potential into a series of huge silos to form the basis of a local cocoa processing industry, designed to unlock the value chain of the country's main cash crop and keep your profits at home rather than ship them. in Europe – and using recipes to launch a modernized industrial economy.

Britain has wiped out its hopes by imposing punitive tariffs on imported processed cocoa products (as opposed to raw beans) to protect its own market. Silos have never been used. Mahama has rebuilt the concrete soles of any of them here. It becomes a mini Imax theater in which five films are shown in a loop. The films show workers from the Agbogbloshie market in Accra, the largest waste treatment site in the world, repeatedly remodeling tin and wood and steel objects left behind by progress: basins and hammers by hand; trying to make a living in post-WWII heavy machinery carrying identification plates from Coventry, Birmingham and Manchester.

The voice-over of this little edifying work comes from the Ghanaian parliamentary debates of the 1950s, held in BBC English, in which the urgency of unleashing the skills and potential of the country's youth is emphasized – with an irony that, in context, always seems possible. as tragic.

The Mahama show is the culmination of this year's Manchester International Festival's visual art offer. The most obvious main act is David Lynch, whose paintings occupy the space of the gallery of the artistic complex Home, where the director has also programmed a season of films and a series of conferences and concerts. Lynch's paintings are somewhat timid products of her upbeat hollyweird imagination: candid illustrations to beautifully sung fairy tales – "I was a teenage insect" or "Billy discovers that he has crap for brains "- or small lithographed storyboards inked standard surrealism:" My head is disconnected "and so on. These are, for better or for worse, the images that Lynch would paint. Considered after the imported and richly exterior world of Mahama, they represent less a double peak than a moderately deviant hill foot.

Number of stars (out of five)
Ibrahim Mahama ★★★★
David Lynch ★★