Whitworth Art Gallery; Home, Manchester
The Ghanaian artist resurrects the detritus of his nation’s post-colonial industry, while Lynch’s painting is predictably Lynchian
The central room of Ibrahim Mahama’s textured and provocative installation transports you 5,000 miles, and then some. A space is created at the heart of Manchester’s Whitworth Art Gallery by tiered seats on four sides. The seats, in an unforgiving, utilitarian mushroom-coloured plastic, polished by countless backsides, each saw decades of service in the second-class carriages of Ghana’s railroad before Mahama shipped them here from the scrapyard. For the empty seats that was the last leg of a very long open-return journey: they were originally made in a factory either in Manchester or Leeds.
The émigré “ghost parliament” they now propose in the gallery is potent with debates: between their quiet, transplanted present and their rattling, storied past, between Britain and its former Gold Coast colony, between the repurposed port cities of Manchester and Accra, once twin engines of empire, and the people who lived and worked and died in them.
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