![\"Mahama_Out](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/94_DO06_Amarica_Mahama_Out-of-Bounds-scaled.jpg\")
Out of Bounds<\/em>, installation view, 56th Venice Biennale, 2015.
Photo : courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Mahama\u2019s choice of jute fabric is particularly interesting considering its growth alongside the rise of industrialized textile production worldwide, and its historical links to empire and commerce more broadly. Jute, a coarse textile blend, was mass-produced in Britain and colonial India in the nineteenth century, then exported internationally through the trade -routes established by the British Empire.1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 1 <\/a> - Gordon Thomas Stewart, Jute and Empire: The Calcutta Jute Wallahs and the Landscapes of Empire<\/em> (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 3\u200a\u2014\u200a5.<\/span> During the Industrial Revolution, jute replaced hemp as a mass-produced material used to make sackcloth, which was primarily used to package and ship agricultural products.2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - \u201cFuture Fibres: Jute,\u201d Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), accessed November 18, 2017, http:\/\/www.fao.org\/economic\/futurefibres\/fibres\/jute\/en\/.<\/span> Today, the production of jute is concentrated to a few countries in Asia and Latin America, then it circulates worldwide through international trade networks and intersects with various agricultural industries along the way.3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - Jayanta Bagchi, Jute: Regional Focus<\/em> (New Delhi: I. K. International Pvt. Ltd., 2006), 1\u200a\u2014\u200a2.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n In West Africa, jute sacks undergo many multifunctional uses across different economies and everyday life. First, jute is used to transport food products such as coffee, rice, and cocoa from West Africa to Europe and the Americas. The sacks are used only once to move cocoa beans\u200a\u2014\u200aone of West Africa\u2019s most valuable exports\u200a\u2014\u200aacross international borders, then reused to transport other domestic crops locally. After being utilized in the food markets, the sacks are repurposed by Ghana\u2019s mining industries, where they intersect with another commodity: coal. It is at this point, after the sacks are too weathered and torn from transporting coal to remain functional, that Mahama acquires them (by exchanging new sacks for the tattered ones), which he incorporates into his installations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2018, Mahama draped his heavy jute panels atop the picturesque Str\u00fcnkede Castle in Herne, Germany. Frayed jute fabric, discoloured from the wear of coal transport, obscured the building\u2019s bleached baroque fa\u00e7ade, turning the scenic moated villa into an eyesore of sorts. Appropriately titled Coal Market<\/em>, the charcoal-stained jute installation not only references coal production in Mahama\u2019s native Ghana but connects to the Ruhr region in which the artwork is exhibited, which has been shaped by its coal mining industry for over 250 years.4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - Sabine Peschel, \u201cCoal and Art: An Unlikely Pair,\u201d Deutsche Welle<\/em>, May 8, 2018, http:\/\/www.dw.com\/en\/coal-and-art-an-unlikely-pair\/a-43684752.<\/span> As he does in his other jute artworks, Mahama interprets the histories of global and local recourses in material form, telling the story of one commodity through another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Following the trajectories of jute, from its colonial beginnings to its industrialization and contemporary uses, exemplifies the multifaceted lives of commodities. In his pivotal volume The Social Life of Things <\/em>(1988),cultural anthropologist Arjun Appadurai claims that commodities are imbued with tremendous social potential because they derive meaning from the global systems within which they circulate. Appadurai sees commodities as the material evidence of complex socio-economic systems rather than as merely manufactured goods, and he follows their trajectories to trace the social and political contexts fundamental to their existence.5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - Arjun Appadurai, \u201cIntroduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,\u201d in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective<\/em>, ed. Arjun Appadurai (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 5.<\/span> Ultimately, he considers commodities to be valuable sources of knowledge and encourages us to look at the larger context of an object\u2019s life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Jute crops are grown in tropical and sub-tropical regions, and ample labour is required to plough, sow, weed, cut, strip, and extract the desired fibre from the plant.6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - R. R. Atkinson, Jute: Fibre to Yarn <\/em>(Bombay: B. I. Publications, 1964), 15.<\/span> Raw jute is dried and collected by farmers then sold to merchants, who transfer the product in bulk to a secondary centre, where it is transformed into yarn.7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - Ibid., 18.<\/span> In the manufacturing stages, raw jute is softened and treated by various machines, spun into yarn, then woven into a heavy-grade fabric, and finally, sewn by hand or machine into sacks.8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 8 <\/a> - Ibid., 35, 38.<\/span> By the time new jute bags are sent out into the world, before even encountering cocoa, coal, or other commodities, they have been sewn, folded, packed, unpacked, carried, and mended. Jute is the product of industrialized labour, and under Mahama\u2019s direction it undergoes yet another series of transformations by more workers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The making of Mahama\u2019s artworks begins with an intentional unmaking<\/em>. Collected jute sacks are disassembled, stitch by stitch, into separate pieces, then joined together into enormous panels. The artist relies on local workers, rural or urban migrants, whom he employs for each project. At documenta 14in 2017, Mahama even invited volunteers to occupy Syntagma Square in Athens and collectively stitch together jute panels as a public performance. Mahama and his many collaborators work together in communal settings, which are often former sites of production\u200a\u2014\u200aaban-doned factories, train stations, markets, or courtyards.9<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 9 <\/a> - Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, \u201cIbrahim Mahama,\u201d documenta 14, accessed September 26, 2017, http:\/\/www.documenta14.de\/en\/artists\/13704\/ibrahim-mahama.<\/span> These environments, with their acts of collective making, seem to denounce capitalist labour practices found in sweatshops, factories, and other types of textile mass-manufacture, in which underpaid labourers produce millions of identical items under deplorable conditions. Bound together by the repeated gestures of unstitching and restitching, Mahama\u2019s collaborators transform individual sacks of jute into a collective whole. This cooperative process enriches the artwork, wherein each maker contributes her or his own set of skills and experiences to the creation of something new. Mahama\u2019s patchwork installations, the product of entangled lives and bodies, are made as much of people as they are of jute sacks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The jute fabric used in Mahama\u2019s installations is especially meaningful because it is a repository for, or artefact of, the lineage of workers and locations behind its production. Having been moved between many spaces and working hands, the porous jute fabric often preserves sand particles, sweat, and other evidence of one setting, then transfers them to another, ultimately picking up more traces anew. For Mahama, the material\u2019s threadbare and weathered state is evocative because it is a testament to its former encounters and uses. Theorist Bill Brown once advocated for studying the physical composition of things, which he saw as material evidence of the state of our world. For if things are formless, tired, or overworked, says Brown, they are tired of us, remnants of a weary world.10<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 10 <\/a> - Bill Brown, \u201cThing Theory,\u201d Critical Inquiry<\/em> 28, no. 1 (2001): 15.<\/span> So too, Mahama\u2019s flaccid cloth, faded burlap, strings, and stitches, in their decrepit and seemingly lifeless state, are remnants of weary, working bodies.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n The decrepit state of this material also hints at a darker, blurrier, and more serious characteristic of the commodity: that the conditions and labour behind the manufacture of global goods are often indistinguishable or unknown. Mahama\u2019s cloth, like many other consumable, everyday products, does not immediately disclose the specific circumstances behind its production, save the occasional indicator, such as a tag or a stamp. The artist\u2019s use of jute thus prompts the questions: Where did this material come from? Who made it? And, because the artwork, like mass-produced goods them-selves, does not offer a straightforward answer, a more pointed question emerges: Do you know the story behind the things you consume? Examining his work ultimately reveals that there is a profound disconnect between Western consumers who buy commodities and the -workers who make them, and yet, these two groups are inextricably connected through the flow of international capital.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For example, Mahama\u2019s use of jute and its association with cocoa speak to unequal distributions of global wealth linked to the production of Ghanaian goods. The cocoa-bean industry, in which half of Ghana\u2019s population participates, accounts for 20 percent of the global market today.11<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 11 <\/a> - \u00d3rla Ryan, Chocolate Nations: Living and Dying for Cocoa in West Africa<\/em> (London and New York: Zed Books, 2011), 23, 25.<\/span> <\/sup>And although cocoa beans are grown, harvested, and packaged by smallholder farmers before they are processed into chocolate abroad, these workers receive only about 4 percent of the final price of an average chocolate bar, compared to the $75 billion gross annual profits generated by major corporations.12<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 12 <\/a> - Ibid., 6.<\/span> Regardless of the integral role played by African labourers in this industry, their efforts and the lived realities of rural poverty remain relatively unknown to Western consumers enjoying a decadent and luxurious product, such as chocolate.13<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 13 <\/a> - Ibid., 54.<\/span> Here, global capitalist markets not only estrange Western consumers from Ghanaian labourers, but render the latter invisible. By making use of a material directly tied to Ghanaian cocoa production, Mahama brings these discussions to the forefront and makes clear that we are all connected to, if not complicit in, the unequal power relations of commodity production.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Adorning the architecture of major metropolises worldwide\u200a\u2014\u200awhether London, Copenhagen, Tel Aviv, or Athens\u200a\u2014\u200aMahama\u2019s installations and their \u201cProduct of Ghana\u201d stamp assert a Ghanaian presence within public space, reminding viewers of Ghana\u2019s role in the global economy. In 2016, Mahama cov-ered the harbour-side fa\u00e7ade of the Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen, highlighting the coming and going of objects from which both museum and port profit. The artwork\u2019s title, Nyhavn\u2019s Kpalang<\/em> (kpalang<\/em> means \u201csack\u201d but also \u201cskin\u201d or \u201cflesh\u201d in Dagbani, one of the languages of the artist\u2019s native northern Ghana), further iterates how infrastructure and architecture, and, in turn, national prosperity, are contingent on real people\u200a\u2014\u200aor, more specifically, real workers.14<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 14 <\/a> - \u201cIbrahim Mahama,\u201d White Cube<\/em>, accessed on September 26, 2017, http:\/\/whitecube.com\/artists\/ibrahim_mahama\/.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n In his home country, Mahama has inter-vened in distinct sites that are continuously adapting to and being shaped by workers. For one installation, Untitled (Adum Railway Station) <\/em>(2013), set in Kumasi in southern Ghana, he cov-ered a decommissioned local railway bridge in jute fabric. Although the train tracks themselves are no longer in use, Ghanaians cross the bridge daily to get from one side of town to the other, and as a result, impromptu commercial stands have emerged.15<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 15 <\/a> - \u201c1:54 FORUM 2014: Osei Bonsu in Conversation with Ibrahim Mahama,\u201d YouTube video, 1:02:34 min, posted by Osei Bonsu, https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch? v=peYpM3FC8h0.<\/span> The installation, made with jute sacks abundant across various Ghanaian industries, sewn together by local workers, then displayed in public sites that facilitate commercial endeavours, manifests the realities of Ghanaian labour past and present, while making it clear that it is workers who will shape the country\u2019s future built environments.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n By incorporating jute fabric into his work, Mahama, in turn, harnesses the histories and processes of industrialized labour inherent to the material. Enveloping buildings and cities worldwide, every panel, every stitch of his jute installations is poignant and deliberate, the product of meaningful manual labour. Moreover, these artworks, and Mahama\u2019s practice more broadly, are a testament to the significant role that contemporary art might play in critically engaging with the entangled histories of labour and capital that constitute today\u2019s global economy. <\/p>\n![\"Mahama_Nyhavn](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/94_DO06_Amarica_Mahama_Nyhavn-Kpalang-scaled.jpg\")
Nyhavn\u2019s Kpalang<\/em>, installation view, Kunsthal Charlottenberg, Copenhagen, 2016-2017.
Photo : courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Mahama\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/94_DO06_Amarica_Mahama_Check-Point-Prosfygika-scaled.jpg\")
Check Point Prosfygika. 1934-2034, 2016-2017<\/em>, Syntagma Square, Ath\u00e8ne, 2017.
Photo : Mathias Voelzke, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Mahama_Untitled\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/94_DO06_Amarica_Mahama_Untitled-scaled.jpg\")
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