Ibrahim Mahama’s Basel commission turns damaged materials into public memory
On Münsterplatz this week, Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama (b. 1987) has unveiled The God of Small Things, a new public commission that extends his signature practice of stitching together histories through fabric, labor, and repair. The work, presented after his win in the inaugural Art Basel Gold Awards in the established artists category, is built from batakari robes, rubber tyres, and long-haul transport canvases.
Mahama’s installation arrives at a moment of unusual visibility. He also received the 2026 Arnold Bode Prize in Kassel and was placed first in the 2025 ArtReview Power 100. Yet the public recognition sits alongside a more difficult chapter: in March, he suffered a physical assault, allegedly at the hands of Ghanaian police, an attack that forced him to halt international travel and lecture commitments.
The artist has long worked with materials that carry visible and invisible histories. From his large studio in Tamale, in northern Ghana, he and a collective of collaborators gather shoemaker boxes, ambulance stretchers, jute sacks, sewing machines, textiles, and industrial remnants. Those objects are then transformed into coverings and structures that speak to colonial extraction, post-colonial aspiration, and the afterlife of infrastructure.
In the interview, Mahama described his practice as rooted in responsibility and redistribution. He said that art is not only about making objects, but about deciding what those objects owe to the communities and histories around them. That idea also shaped his account of an old metal bridge near Elmina Castle, which once connected nearby communities to one of the first forts built by the British. When the bridge deteriorated, he said, authorities chose demolition over repair. For Mahama, that loss became another reminder that artists can intervene where official memory fails.
His work has often been read through the language of monument and repair, but Mahama resists treating history as something sealed off in the past. The God of Small Things suggests a more unsettled proposition: that the present is made of residues, and that public art can still carry the weight of what has been broken, displaced, and left behind.
