Edinburgh
Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama’s “Songs about Roses” (on view through October 6, 2024) is immensely strong and achingly tender. Realized by a community of makers, as is Mahama’s way, it’s an exploration of freedom, as he says, and his acknowledgement of this cultural labor acts as a counterpoint to the physical labor of building the railway in Ghana under British colonial rule (which only ended in 1957). The tattooed arms of the women who worked as Mahama’s studio assistants, which appear in photographs within the work, echo a practice that enabled traveling laborers to be identified in industrial accidents.
In what amounts to a palimpsest of ideas and materials, Mahama brings scraps and fragments salvaged from the German-built Henschel trains used on the railway together into contemporary works that evoke something of the mental and physical anguish of that history, transplanting it into a gallery that appropriately sits atop a major arterial railway station. This juxtaposition of past and present across differing political and geographical landscapes throws the deep-seated colonial grip on what was known as the Gold Coast into sharp relief. The railway was used to transport resources such as gold, cocoa, and minerals, building British wealth, and Mahama’s photographs, films, charcoal and ink drawings, and sculptures reinvigorate those materials and defunct histories.
SEKONDI LOCOMOTIVE WORKSHOP (2024), a powerful ensemble installation, finds a perfect setting among the black-painted beams and joists of Fruitmarket’s dark warehouse. A seven-channel film presentation shares the story of his collaborators as they reclaim materials for use in the works; while in an accompanying audio voiceover, a young woman calls for the youth of Ghana to be given the opportunity to govern themselves (more than 70 percent of the population is under the age of 35). Within this context, the four formidable sculptures of SEKONDI LOCOMOTIVE WORKSHOP bring an element of hope into a show filled with historical anguish. In celebration and remembrance of those who worked at the Sekondi rail workshop before independence, rows of life-size portraits are mounted on railway tracks. Mahama’s memorial reclaims their contributions to Ghana’s fight for self-governance. Evidence of the past is recorded in the vast weighty structures that support these banks of figures, especially the sections of railway track. The trains imported to Ghana may have been German castoffs, but it was British colonial railway engineering that underpinned those schemes—Leeds, Glasgow, Ipswich, Smethwick.
The muscular strength of Mahama’s installation in underlined by the enormity of these sections of rail. There is no sugar-coating, and the ghostly shadows cast all around the warehouse walls act as a reminder of the darkness of colonial rule. Equally, the specificity of individual faces, drawn from archival photographs, honors individuals and their experiences, while the voice calling for youth agency intervenes with a particularly personal touch that suffuses the work with hopefulness.
