Ibrahim Mahama

Parliament of Ghosts was conceived for The Whitworth art gallery in Manchester as part of the Manchester International Festival in 2019. The work originally addressed historical ideas around materials and issues of colonial exploitation, but it was subsequently transformed into the architecture of Red Clay in Tamale, Ghana. The set-up allows objects and ecosystems to coexist with architectural form, from a conceptual, philosophical, and physical point of view. Memories are excavated through the placement of non-human forms while young audiences are encouraged to acquire new perspectives on their relationship to architecture. The space was inspired by both the residue of the Gold Coast Railway infrastructure and abandoned modernist buildings from the 1960s Nkrumah’s Voli-ni in Tamale.
In The Laboratory of the Future, a series of questions are posed. How do we restore memories to which access was denied? How do we excavate the past in order to build new futures?

Authorial collaborators
SCCA Tamale, Red Clay Studios, Nkrumah Voli-ni, blaxTARLINES KUMASI, Maame Adwoa Prempeh
Technical collaborators
Mubarek Mohammed Mahama, Issah Mohammed Ibrahim, Abraham Kudjie, Benjamin Okantey, Francis Djiwornu, Zakaria Danaa
Team
SCCA Tamale, Red Clay Studios, Nkrumah Voli-ni, blaxTARLINES KUMASI, Maame Adwoa Prempeh
With the additional support of
APALAZZOGALLERY, Brescia and White Cube, London
With special thanks to
Francesca Migliorati, Manuela Nebuloni