Filthy black and brown jute sacks are draped across the pristine walls of London’s White Cube. Young Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama has been using them in his art for years, sewing them together, repurposing and reimagining them into abstract canvases of dirt and history.
This is the torn aesthetic of economics. These used, stained, discarded sacks are the story of hope through enterprise: they’re what’s left after the produce has been grown, farmed and shipped. And in those journeys you’ll find the stories of hundreds of people trying to make a living. Your eyes sprint over the fabric for hints of the lives within. Did the businesses succeed or fold? How about the farmers, the works, the shippers?
Pinned to the wall alongside these is an immense collection of Ghanaian birth certificates, a reminder that there’s a human at the root of every transaction.
Next door, Mahama has compiled a ceiling-scraping tower of shoeshine boxes. They’ve been chopped up and reassembled into new shapes – a process he undertakes collaboratively in a state-owned paint factory – and stacked up into a wobbly, precarious edifice. Here the sacks are the discarded remains of economics, these are the very means of business, the tools of trade, reimagined and transformed into a story. Sure, there’s a bit of cloak-and-dagger hypocrisy in this being shown – and most importantly sold – in one of the world’s most successful commercial art galleries, but that’s the icky reality of capitalism.
The aesthetics and specifics here are African, but the narrative is universal. It’s hope transformed into art, economic transactions turned into something bigger than themselves, the failings and successes of capitalism pulled off the garbage heap and given new life. These are your work hours, your business ideas, your email outbox.
@eddyfrankel