Ibrahim Mahama Rebuilds a Ghanaian Glass Factory Inside Fondation Cartier

By Priya Raman

Ibrahim Mahama bought an entire Ghanaian glass factory, shipped part of it to Paris, and rebuilt it inside the Fondation Cartier with 25,000 green glass bottles. The installation, titled Things Fall Apart, anchors 'The Harvest Season', the second major exhibition in the foundation's new Jean Nouvel-designed building. It runs until 28 February 2027.

Mahama, born in 1987 in Tamale, northern Ghana, shares the entire museum with nine associated artists and collectives. Burlap sacks hang between the building's 19th-century arches facing the Place du Palais Royal. The fabric comes from sacks made in India or Bangladesh, used to transport cocoa from Ghana to Europe. Mahama draped the Arsenale in the same material at the 2015 Venice Biennale, his international breakout, after studying at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST).

What happened to Ghana's independence utopias?

Mahama's work tracks Ghana's history from colonialism through independence euphoria to the 1966 coup that ended its early democratic experiment. Exhibition curator Aby Gaye-Duparc frames the show's central question: 'What remains of these utopias conceived at the time of African independence, in the late 1950s and early 1960s? What legacies have endured? What failures? And how do we build the future from that utopia?'

Parliament of Ghosts carries that question physically. The installation is a parliamentary chamber of empty chairs — a metaphor for democracy cut short. Mahama changes the work each time he shows it; here he uses wooden stools from Ghana's Asante Empire, forcibly annexed by the British in 1902.

A factory bought, dismantled and shipped

Things Fall Apart has the show's most improbable backstory. While preparing the exhibition, Mahama learned the Aboso Glass Factory in southern Ghana faced demolition. President Kwame Nkrumah opened the bottle plant in 1966, weeks before his overthrow. Mahama used the exhibition fee to acquire it.

'I thought, wouldn't it be interesting if we used the capital that was coming from the Fondation Cartier to acquire this factory, and then rebuild a section of it here in Paris, but also rebuild it in the studio in Tamale as a new public space that allows us to be able to reflect on these histories?' he said. 'So we did. That's where the question of the harvest came from.'

The installation combines the factory's original sign and metal structure with 1,000 stacked wooden crates. Mahama calls the two-year process of purchasing, dismantling and shipping the factory 'insanely difficult'. His justification: 'It would introduce a new audience to a very different position in terms of what art from the continent has to offer.'

Three art centres, nine guests

Mahama has reinvested his sales earnings into three art centres in Tamale, open to artists, schoolchildren and the public. At one, Red Clay, he keeps decommissioned trains from Ghana's manganese and bauxite mines as archives. 'I've always believed that when an artist produces an object, the object is not just reliant on the so-called intellectual value of the artist, because there are so many people who touch these objects, who use them,' he said.

The invited artists include:

• Dorothy Akpene Amenuke, Mahama's KNUST professor who inspired his burlap work, showing the velvety red weaving Gli ('wall')
• Zohra Opoku, a German-Ghanaian artist whose screenprinted textiles explore meeting her village-chief father for the first time at 27, shortly before his death
• James Barnor, 97, Ghana's first photojournalist, showing new large-format Polaroid portraits made with Mahama at a reconstruction of his 1950s Accra studio, Ever Young, alongside earlier work
• Gideon Appah, Mahama's art-school contemporary, whose figurative paintings of 1970s Ghanaian culture hang beside Musée d'Orsay loans
• CATPC (Congolese Plantation Workers Art League), whose cacao, sugar, salt and palm-oil sculpture of a collector riding a bull targets Western museums

Amenuke's verdict on her former student: 'Ibrahim is exceptional. Wherever he finds himself, whatever brought him there, he always acknowledges that he didn't come this far by himself.'

Taking back strength

CATPC member Ced'art Tamasala addressed the paradox of exhibiting in France. The collective's proceeds buy back land confiscated in 1911 by the brothers who built Unilever using forced labour. 'This is different, because we have chosen to put our works in Western museums that were supported by forced labour,' Tamasala said. 'We are coming to take back a bit of the strength, to bring it back to the plantation where everything came from.'

The exhibition opened amid Paris social upheaval. Mahama dismissed the timing question: 'It's always the time, because the world has been in crisis for far too long, and artists can have a very important role to play.'

What changes for Paris visitors is simple: a Jean Nouvel building now holds a piece of Ghanaian industrial history, bought with art money and rebuilt 4,800 kilometres from home.