Ibrahim Mahama: the artist builds a parliament from recycled train seats

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Dozens of worn plastic train seats and ramshackle wooden lockers destined for landfill in Ghana have found themselves in a Manchester art gallery, in the work of one of the most talented young artists. exciting from Africa.

When hundreds of broken, scuffed second-clbad train seats were abandoned after dismantling their cars that had been shot down several years ago, only one man was likely to interest them.

Ibrahim Mahama has made a name for himself by collecting items that other people would consider junk food, but that he thinks he can help tell a story.

After getting the seats back, the artist reused 120 – as well as several dozens of old lockers once used by train workers – to create a four-sided imitation of the Ghanaian parliament chamber at the gallery. Whitworth in Manchester. This is called the Parliament of Ghosts.

People are invited to use the Parliament of Ghosts for their own debates (Michael Pollard)

The ghosts, he says, are opportunities that his home country has not seized over the years, and train seats and railway lockers symbolize this story.

Ghana's rail system was built under British colonial rule and was to be expanded after the optimism of independence in 1957, with railway workers playing a key role in the movement for independence. But optimism has faded, economic growth has struggled to take off and a series of military coups have hindered progress. The railways have been neglected for decades.

The Parliament of Ghosts represents "the potential of a country that was yet to manifest itself, but which has never materialized," says Mahama. He believes that seats and other objects carry the memories of everything that they have seen and gone through. "They embody all that."

The same goes for lockers. "A lot of these cupboards were used to store workers' clothes, tools and other objects, so the restoration and dismantling of the trains had a lot of fat.

A photo of Ghanaian railway workers used in the installation of Mahama (Michael Pollard)

"Cabinets become almost those living organisms that bear witness to the whole cycle of life, generation after generation, of how a certain system has been maintained – but at the same time, of its faults." I like to think that They are living beings who can speak in a language that the workers themselves can not. "

The Parliament of Ghosts not only represents the weaknesses of the government of Ghana, but aims to highlight the failures of parliaments around the world – and it is not the least important, at the time of the Brexit block, the United Kingdom. "The Parliament of Ghosts is a question of what the potential lies in the world's failures," said Mahama.

It is thought that the seats of the trains were manufactured in Manchester or Leeds, which adds to the story of their return. This is the first major exhibition of the Ghanaian artist in the UK – commissioned by the Manchester International Film Festival – and people are invited to use his House of Parliament to organize their own debates, performances and projections.

Films are screened inside a replica of a disused Ghanaian concrete cocoa silo (Michael Pollard)

He has many more train places in his country and plans to create a much larger version of the parliament in the arts center that he opened in Tamale in March.

"When I propose a work, I always make sure I have one maybe three or four times bigger in Ghana, that we can somehow use to create permanent spaces for the local community, " did he declare. "Because that's the point." I guess I'm pretty tired of seeing how, as artists, we produce works that end up going to Europe and elsewhere, while locally, our own people can not experience the ideas we work with. "

Mahama also explains how her institute – the Savannah Center for Contemporary Art – is working on initiatives for agriculture, housing and education. But it is also sought after in Europe and beyond. At 32, he is represented by the prestigious White Cube Gallery in London and was the youngest of six artists to exhibit at the first Ghanaian Pavilion of the Venice Biennale.

Jute flags of Ibrahim Mahama in front of the United Nations headquarters. (Getty Images).

Previously, he made art from hundreds of wooden toolboxes used by shoe shiners and by covering the buildings with jute bags used to transport cocoa, corn and charcoal. . He also recently used the bags to replace the flags in front of the United Nations headquarters at the Rockerfeller Center in New York. Replacing national flags with rotting food bags "reminded us of the global situation," he said.

The Manchester exhibition also includes a replica of concrete silos built in Ghana in the late 1950s to store cocoa beans before processing, but which remained empty. Mahama also obtained abused Ghanaian wood school libraries after proposing to make new furniture for the schools that would replace them.

"The more objects, with decay and stains, are old, that's what I find valuable," says the artist. "Memory and pattern are something that speaks to us – rather than when a thing is very new and that it has almost no soul."

The Parliament of Ghosts is at Whitworth Gallery until September 29th.