Ghana’s Ibrahim Mahama first African to top annual art power list

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Artist who once draped Barbican in brightly coloured fabric says he is humbled by recognition in ArtReview rankings

Ibrahim Mahama

The Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama has become the first African to be named the most influential figure in the art world in ArtReview magazine’s annual power list.

Mahama, whose work often uses found materials including textile remnants, topped the ranking of the contemporary art world’s most influential people and organisations as chosen by a global judging panel.

He told the Guardian he felt humbled to be named at the top of a list he first heard about while studying at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Ghana in 2011, when the Chinese dissident Ai Weiwei topped the ranking.

He said: “For me to be part of this, especially coming from a place like Ghana, which for many years was almost as if we were not even part of the discourse, is quite humbling.”

Mahama, who is based in Ghana’s northern city of Tamale, said he hoped his success could inspire younger artists in his country to “realise that they are part of the contemporary discourse and not just on the sideline”.

Mark Rappolt, ArtReview’s editor-in-chief, said the choice of Mahama indicated that the seat of power was shifting in the world of art.

He said: “I think you could also look at that as saying there’s a realignment of where global finance sits … I wouldn’t say that the art world is separate from those worlds. The MENA region has historically always been a bridge between east and west.”

The power list’s top 10 features several artists and curators from the Middle East and Africa. Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, one of the most powerful women in Qatar and the chair of Qatar Museums since 2006, is at No 2, in part due to her immense purchasing power.

Last year’s No 1, Sheikha Hoor al-Qasimi, the president and director of the Sharjah Art Foundation in the United Arab Emirates, slips two places to No 3, and the Egyptian artist Wael Shawky comes in at No 4.

Singapore’s Ho Tzu Nyen (5), the Americans Amy Sherald (6), Kerry James Marshall (7) and Saidiya Hartman (8), the UK-based group Forensic Architecture (9) and Germany’s Wolfgang Tillmans (10) round out the top 10.

Mahama has had an incredibly busy couple of years. He is represented by the influential Apalazzo Gallery and White Cube galleries and his practice includes using old hospital beds, discarded train carriages and other artefacts that he turns into art objects.

Last year at Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket Gallery, Mahama’s Songs About Roses, which focused on the rise and fall of the railway that the British government built in Ghana between 1898 and 1923, was described as being “as extraordinary as a great magic-realist novel”.

The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones said the work’s reckoning with history’s ghosts “puts Mahama up there with William Kentridge and Anselm Kiefer as one of today’s most important artists”.

A few months before his Edinburgh show opened, Mahama draped the Barbican in 2,000 sq metres of bright pink fabric, which had been stitched together in a football field in Ghana because it was so large.

In 2019, Mahama opened the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art in Tamale, a 900 sq metre site that is an exhibition space, library, residency space, archive and studio.

Rappolt said many of the highest-ranking artists ran programmes in their local communities. He said of Mahama: “He’s not acting as this classic idea of the sole artist producing his own the flashes of genius, but also as a person who’s part of a community.”

Thirty anonymous experts from around the world compiled the annual power ranking, which has been running for 24 years.