On Stage-Crafting and State-Crafting Beyond Crisis: Ibrahim Mahama's Word and Deed

Ibrahim Mahama (b. 1987) will probably find his name in the dwindling list of artists who would be missed when contemporary art, as we have it today, gives way to another regime already pressing into our view from postausterity and postpandemic pasts and futures. For close to a decade, his collaborative critiques and forms of social formatting have been sounding boards for collectivist and emancipatory politics under pre-, intra-, and postcrisis conditions. Indeed, his corpus of massive jute-sack installations in city spaces stands out as the most recognizable among his projects. However, it is just a single node in a complex ecology of formats and practices—in Bourriaud's phrasing, "a salient point in a shifting cartography" (2002: 19). As if responding unambiguously to Tania Bruguera's call to return Duchamp's urinal from the art museum to the washroom, Mahama's location-specific and quasiperformative projects seem to operate on a logic of capital repatriation while continuing to function as sites for ideological overhauling, improvised living, and generative platforms for gift exchange. While aspects of his body of works affirm, to a degree, their autonomous form as alienated spectacles or their alchemical form as "derivatives," "futures," or "tokens" in the international art market, they are also contingent in a dynamic assemblage.

Thus, when in lieu of this complex configuration, Brian Sewell (2014), the controversial critic, merely saw the "pathetic beauty" of an "Arte Povera decoration of old coal sacks sewn together, worn, torn, and filthy" and, again, "missed the political and social argument," he reduced Mahama's expanded practice to a modernist spectacle, a frozen moment, or a snapshot. There is a similar slip in judgement in Danish artist Kristoffer Ørum's (2016)¹ critique of Mahama's Nyhavn's Kpalang project at the harbor façade at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, in which Mahama's installation is reduced to an all-over surface composition reminiscent of large-scale Art Informel or "AbEx" canvases. To him, Antoni Tapies and Jackson Pollock are the archetypal precursors and muses. Just two years after Sewell's encounter with the jute sack installation at the Saatchi show, an exhibition in Dusseldorf would explore parallels between Mahama's jute sack projects and Alberto Burri's "sacchi" corpus.² All these offer some insights but miss important points, in spite of, or possibly because of art's polysemy. As Mahama demonstrates in his reflections on Burri's work and twentieth-century painting and sculpture, he hardly takes shelter behind postwar cemeteries of artistic brand names, while not being oblivious of or averse to them.³ Evidently, such interpretations tend to rob the artist's work of the concrete social, material, and ecological encounters he sets in place and the generative modalities embodied in his practice. They miss the multisensory and extrahuman registers that he codes into his body of works.

Another set of tropes consistent in Mahama's projects that frequently eludes the grasp of commentators is his dramaturgical reflection on precarity, death, and temporality and their allegorical cognates in material culture, urban life and architecture, and ruins of twentieth-century mass utopias. This set of tropes establishes methodological connections between the theatrical forms (stage-crafting) he deploys in his public installations and the emancipatory politics (state-crafting) he proposes in his social practice. Together, these modalities of practice affirm collective rights, reclaim encroached commons of nature and culture, and bring notions of private property to weird paradoxes.⁴

This text meditates on Mahama's complex dramaturgy, which foregrounds these tropes and reflections and points to ways in which Mahama hyphenates the "reality" of the theater and the "fiction" of the social. It is an insider's fragmented notes stitched together and wrapped around a dramatic structure of three acts and an epilogue. This stylistic device reflects the patchwork, archival, and theatrical methods that underpin Mahama's installations and social interventions. The text suggests that Mahama's projects are epitaphs to precarious labor and disposable life under neoliberal capitalist sovereignty. Yet these epitaphs or "immersive taxidermies" and their cognates are also Mahama's means of testing...