Ibrahim Mahama has bridges on his mind. While bridge-building is a constitutive aim for many artists, few have intervened in actual artistic infrastructure with the facility and scale that Mahama brings. Over the past decade, the artist has become internationally known for his textile works – made of jute and rubber, and incorporating vernacular crafts and daily objects from his native Ghana – and colossal installations that use objects to speak of dispossession, colonial disrepair, and entropy.

But key to Mahama’s art is that it serves two audiences: He is a global artist, but he also plays the role of a local institution-founder. A bridge-builder in a metaphorical sense, these days he has set his sights on a literal bridge back home: the corroded steel bridge in Ghana that once crossed the Benya Lagoon and led to St. George’s Castle – a fortress, built by the Portuguese in 1482, that under Dutch administration later became one of the transatlantic slave trade’s key nodes.

For Mahama, who was born in Tamale but raised in Accra, the bridge, built in 1931, holds an outsize significance. First, as a remnant of the unfathomable personal and collective cost of slavery, it connects to the inhumane historical acts that continue to leave a mark on global political and economic injustices. But equally vital, for Mahama, is the reality that this steel bridge fell into disrepair due to an absence of maintenance or investment against its corrosive oxidation. Such decay, he told me in May, is common in places like Ghana that lack the legal protections to maintain historically significant sites. ‘This kind of cultural genocide happens on a daily basis,’ Mahama said. Which is why the artist recently purchased the bridge himself, and – in a feat of Fitzcarraldo-like effort – has moved the entire 200-ton bridge into a studio complex in Tamale, where it will become a public monument. ‘We had to use heavy cranes and divers because they had to dismantle it,’ Mahama told me. ‘I like the idea that we can freeze these objects – we can look for a moment at the amount of history contained in them.’

To show the bridge as a monument to the public, Mahama plans to build a new space. The gesture is typical of his practice: recovery, removal, and recontextualization. Objects are not simply rescued, but rerouted. Mahama has developed a reputation as a symbolic gravedigger of sorts, digging up artifacts of post-independence decay, from disused train cars to Soviet planes. It was, after all, through a series of installations that Mahama burst onto the scene 11 years ago with works of stitched and woven jute sacks (used to transport goods such as cocoa from Ghana). The magnificent jute sack installation, Out of Bounds, which covered the walls of the Arsenale for the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015 curated by Okwui Enwezor, was an opening salvo of an exhibition that, like Mahama’s art, seemed to say: This is the world you have left behind, which you have colonized, and here I am showing its materials back to you, just as you left them.

Appearances in major exhibitions such as Documenta 14 in 2017 followed, as did public art projects in cities such as Milan and New York. But that is only half the story. Responding to a relative absence of institutional structures in parts of Ghana, the artist has been creating his own in the country’s Northern Region. In 2019, he launched the artist-run Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art (SCCA); Red Clay Studio was inaugurated the following year; and Nkrumah Volini, an exhibition and educational space considered an extension of SCCA, opened in 2021. All located in Tamale, these nascent institutions are not just symbolic counter-monuments, but working studios and spaces involving ecosystems of workers, craftspeople, publics, and students – people who make, show, teach, view, fabricate, and make a living in this infrastructure. In this way, Mahama belongs to a newer strain of contemporary artists who use the art world’s capital inflows not simply to sustain their own practices, but to redistribute access to other makers.

Last year, the artist won the Gold Award in the Established Artist category at the inaugural Art Basel Awards. ‘Winning the Basel prize was very important to me – part of the prize money went into buying this bridge, with its significant history,’ Mahama told me. ‘When I won the Sam Gilliam Award, I was saving colonial trains,’ he adds, alluding to a long-standing engagement with Ghana’s railway history (since 2022, the artist has acquired several decommissioned locomotives from the British-built rail network, which now act as classrooms and sculptures; last year one diesel locomotive appeared in an installation at Kunsthalle Wien). He estimates that about a fifth of his earnings go back to his institutions, through workshops or community programs. ‘The question is how to build a society that allows for a certain level of justice and equity,’ he says. ‘We can use some of the mechanisms of the art world to create something back there.’

Money can be a dirty word when talking about artistic practices, but so much of Mahama’s practice centers on the idea of resources: who has access to them, who is using whom, and what happens when these resources or their potential are squandered. A major throughline of his work is the failed potential represented by post-independence attempts at enabling local economies. Mahama repeatedly returns to the historical figure of Kwame Nkrumah – independent Ghana’s first prime minister, then president, from 1957 to 1966. In the years after Ghanaian independence, Nkrumah embarked on an ambitious program of industrialization and Pan-African redistribution. Freedom was not merely national sovereignty, but a material question of how to build factories, schools, roads, and institutions.

‘One of Nkrumah’s ideas was the question of freedom,’ Mahama told me. ‘The question was: “What happens now that we have freedom, and how do we redistribute it? How do we make sure that it’s not Ghana alone that has independence, but that we help Congo, Nigeria, and all these African countries?” Industrialization was very important, because the whole premise of the colonial project had been extraction.’ In 1966, Nkrumah was ousted in a CIA-aided coup, dying in exile. Mahama’s work often focuses on what happened after this, when the politician’s economic vision was abandoned and things fell into ruin.

The God of Small Things (2026), Mahama’s Art Basel commission, turns to the history of the Bonsa Tyre Company, a post-independence industrial project established in 1963 in Ghana’s Western Region and later fully absorbed by the state. After decades of underinvestment and decline, the company collapsed and, in 2010, was put up for sale. For Mahama, the story of the Bonsa Tyre Company is emblematic both of the long tail of colonial-era extraction and the ongoing battle for economic and cultural autonomy faced by formerly colonized states. In this case, after the Bonsa Tyre Company ceased operation, whatever rubber was found to be defective was not sold off for scrap but simply buried on the original factory site. Mahama obtained permission to excavate the rubber artifacts – ‘like a graveyard,’ he told me.

On Münsterplatz in Basel’s Altstadt, Mahama is placing an enormous sculptural and spatial installation in which roughly 12 large-format textile forms hang in the square, suspended like curtains or thresholds – they include jute sacks, industrial remnants, metal ID tags from Ghanaian cocoa trading companies, headpans (iron bowls used in Ghana to transport goods on the head), and rubber remains of the Bonsa tires. ‘The idea was to take the residue of this factory and use it to create these textile forms,’ Mahama tells me. ‘I’m interested in how we can explore the promises within this failure,’ he says. His project is a way of acknowledging the labor, the material, and economic waste of human energy that found its last station in the scrapyard of history.

‘When I started making my work, one of the things I had to be conscious of was the question of justice,’ says Mahama. ‘Historically, in Ghana, most artists were not part of this dialogue. Their work was not shown in Venice, or in major museums. That has started to change. But we also understand that many works by African artists, whether Modern or contemporary, are now entering Western institutions. Foremost, I’m thinking: what does this mean for people in Ghana?’ The bridge, rubber, jute sacks, the Münsterplatz installation – everything Mahama makes is, in some sense, an attempt to answer this question.