Ibrahim Mahama Rebuilds Ghanaian Bottle Factory in Paris — SkimNews
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- Ibrahim Mahama opened a major exhibition at the Fondation Cartier in Paris built around his "Parliament of Ghosts" installation, where visitors sit on Asante stools confronting the 1966 Ghanaian military coup and the fall of pre-colonial empires.
- Mahama bought an old West African bottle factory in 2024 and reconstructed its rusted steel beams and walls lined with crates of Coca-Cola, Schweppes, Kool and Club Minerals bottles inside the Paris museum as a monument to collapsed industry.
- Nine other artists and collectives from Mahama's network — connected to his three art centres near Tamale, Ghana — anchor the rest of the show, framing it as collective action rather than a solo retrospective.
- The Congolese Plantation Workers Art League (CATPC) contributed chocolate sculptures molded in Amsterdam from DRC-cast forms, with every sale funding the buyback of land confiscated by the Lever Brothers (now Unilever) in the early 20th century.
- Dorothy Akpene Amenuke, Mahama's 2013 art teacher, contributed a long undulating scroll of jute and bark that snakes across the top floor of the museum.
- Courage Dzidula Kpodo built a full wall from red earth clay using historic building methods rendered obsolete by modern concrete, framing those techniques as a form of resistance.
Why it matters: By reconstructing Ghanaian and Congolese ruination as monumental gallery installations — and routing every CATPC chocolate-sale toward land buyback from the Lever Brothers' corporate successor — the show reframes wreckage as a working blueprint and hands a global institutional platform to Tamale-area artists who rarely get one.
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