Ibrahim Mahama, a Ghanaian artist recently named the most powerful figure in the international art world, is bringing a large-scale exhibition of his industrial installations to Paris this month. The show, titled *The Harvest Season*, will open at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain’s new gallery opposite the Louvre from October 22 through February 28. It aims to present a condensed version of Mahama’s sprawling 100-acre Red Clay studio, located on the outskirts of his hometown Tamale in northern Ghana.
Red Clay, established by Mahama over the past decade, is more than a traditional studio. Set in a region marked by economic hardship and limited infrastructure, the complex resembles a semi-abandoned industrial site, complete with red-brick warehouses, old train carriages, and broken airplane parts scattered through the grounds. The site merges community life with art, as local villagers, children, and animals continue to inhabit and move through the space. Mahama’s installations often draw on historical objects and materials charged with layers of social, economic, and colonial histories.
His work features recycled and discarded items—such as industrial scraps, clay pots, wooden shoeshine boxes, and jute sacks—reworked into large-scale displays. One notable installation at Red Clay consists of rows of wooden school desks, each fitted with a worn but functional sewing machine that activates when a switch is turned on, evoking themes of mass production and industrial labor. The artist frequently revisits the legacy of Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, whose industrialization efforts were cut short by a 1966 CIA-backed coup, a pivotal event Mahama cites as central to understanding Ghana’s stalled development.
Mahama’s pieces often incorporate materials like oil-stained cloth used in fish smoking, known locally as *obroni wawu*, or “dead white man’s clothing.” These used fabrics carry physical traces of labor and history, symbolizing the intertwined impacts of colonialism, labor exploitation, and global trade. The artist describes such materials as “charged” with the presence of past bodies and experiences.
*The Harvest Season* exhibition, the Fondation Cartier’s first major solo show since moving into its refurbished 19th-century building, will also include collaborative works with nine other artists and collectives from Africa and Europe. Among the featured collaborators are Ghanaian-German textile artist Zohra Opoku and Accra-based painter Gideon Appah. The show will present charcoal drawings, textile works, and a reconstruction of the Aboso Glass factory, one of Nkrumah’s significant industrial projects.
Curator Aby Gaye-Duparc has expressed a desire to evoke the communal atmosphere of Tamale’s Red Clay for Paris audiences, incorporating workshops, talks, and immersive videos. One educational initiative involves inviting French schoolchildren to participate in classes set in a recreated version of Mahama’s *Parliament of Ghosts*—an installation built from salvaged furniture and Ashanti stools—prior to public opening hours.
Born in Tamale in 1987 and raised mainly in Accra, Mahama studied at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Kumasi, where he was part of an art collective promoting “emancipatory art,” encouraging freedom from colonial artistic legacies. He gained international prominence with his 2015 Venice Biennale installation *Out of Bounds*, a monumental quilt of stitched-together jute sacks used to transport Ghana’s cocoa exports. This work established key themes regarding labor, industrial history, extraction, and the often obscured connections between African economies and Western industrial wealth.
Mahama’s rise has been notable among Western critics, culminating in his recognition at the top of ArtReview’s 2025 Power 100 list, making him the first African artist to receive this distinction. He is also known for reinvesting profits from international sales back into cultural and preservation projects in Tamale, including efforts to protect historical sites such as a Russian cemetery and colonial-era buildings.
While some artists prefer their work to speak independently, Mahama emphasizes the importance of articulating the context and histories behind his installations. He has stated that, unlike earlier generations where an artist’s voice was less prioritized, his generation values the combination of artistic production and intellectual explanation as integral to their expression.
With *The Harvest Season*, Mahama and the Fondation Cartier face the challenge of conveying the vast scale and layered complexities of his ongoing projects within the constraints of a Parisian gallery. Nevertheless, the exhibition promises to provide insight into his continuous exploration of history, labor, and material culture through an evolving process rather than fixed completion.