IBRAHIM MAHAMA: A SPELL OF GOOD THINGS

White Cube is pleased to present ‘A SPELL OF GOOD THINGS’ by Ibrahim Mahama, the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York.

September 5 – October 26, 2024

The exhibition’s eponymous installation, A SPELL OF GOOD THINGS (2024), draws its title from contemporary writer Ayòbámi Adébáyò’s roman à clef of the same name. Resonating with Adébáyò’s exploration of the systemic issues of post-colonial Nigeria, Mahama’s installation draws attention to questions of occupation, politics and infrastructure in his own native Ghana. Occupying the gallery’s main space, an assemblage of decrepit beds from the Tamale Teaching Hospital in Northern Ghana – where Mahama lives and works – sit alongside parts salvaged from the interiors of defunct train carriages.

Several of the hospital beds are covered with leather ‘sheets’, inscribed with the names of individuals who died at the hospital, those displaced or migrated due to post-Independence economic instability, and the names of locations drawn from British colonial maps, tattooed with carbon sourced from kerosene lamps. Built in the 1970s, the hospital was commissioned by the then-Head of State, Colonel Ignatius K. Acheampong, as a training site for medical professionals and the primary hospital for the northern region. Despite projected success, severe resource shortages resulted in numerous preventable deaths at the facility, including, most poignantly, that of Mahama’s own brother.

In 2023, Mahama negotiated with the Ghanaian Railway Development Ministry to salvage entire train carriages, tracks and a number of machine parts from the pre- and post-Independence era that would otherwise have been discarded as scrap metal.

Be they jute sacks, hospital beds or train parts, the artist understands the use of these objects in combination as inextricably linked with the loss of life, infrastructural collapse and widespread deterioration that has marred Ghana’s post-Independence era. By contrast, art, for Mahama, becomes a vessel of boundless ‘potential and possibility’, a medium which transcends the bureaucratic barriers that have perpetuated these failures. Through its transformative acts of reclamation and empowerment, Mahama’s work beckons us to ‘gather new forms of courage, new forms of imagination, to push the world forward in a more sustainable way.’