Ibrahim Mahama’s ‘Parliament of Ghosts’: Material, Memory And The Afterlives Of Trade

• Ibrahim Mahama’s installation uses historically marked materials to reflect on colonialism and global trade.

• Parliament of Ghosts stages history as a space haunted by unpaid labour, abandoned promises of independence, and the extractive logics that persist under postcolonial states.

• Materials used in the installation are sourced locally

For Ibrahim Mahama, art is a political method—one that works through material rather than metaphor. Art offers him a particular kind of freedom—not merely expressive freedom, but the freedom to think through material itself.

His practice traces how objects move through time and space, how labour is embedded within them, and how these material histories are structured into everyday life The freedom his art seeks is analytical: the freedom to think through material as a historical and political force.

Afterlives of Colonial Trade

At the Kochi Biennale, Mahama presents Parliament of Ghosts, a monumental installation that confronts the afterlives of colonialism and capital. Though only 36, Mahama has emerged as one of Ghana’s most internationally recognised artists, known for transforming discarded or institutional materials into sites of historical reckoning. The work stages history as a space haunted by unpaid labour, abandoned promises of independence, and the extractive logics that persist under postcolonial states.

Ibrahim Mahama transformed a hall at Anand Warehouse—a remnant of Kochi’s historic trade economy—into Parliament of Ghosts. Towering walls of stitched jute sacks enclose the space. At the same time, wooden chairs are arranged in a stepped gallery, evoking an assembly meant for debate, listening, and collective gathering. Sourced locally, the jute sacks bear stains, marks, and wear accumulated over years of circulation. Once instruments of trade, they carry the traces of hard labour and exploitation embedded in global commerce. By reworking these everyday materials, Mahama turns the installation into a meditation on the unequal structures that continue to shape trade and exchange.

The “ghosts” in the title are actually not metaphors. They are the workers written out of official histories, the colonial structures adapted rather than dismantled, and the futures sacrificed to development models driven by accumulation rather than care. Mahama’s installation offers no comfort of closure or nostalgia; it calls for reckoning, confronting viewers with how colonial power persists by transforming itself and how material remnants continue to regulate labour, bodies, and the political imagination.

Material Objects as Medium

Mahama has often explained that his choice of materials is inseparable from Ghana’s colonial history. Cocoa, introduced in the nineteenth century, emerged as one of the region’s most valuable commodities by the 1870s, eventually making Ghana a leading global producer. To streamline this extractive economy, the British built railway networks that connected cocoa-growing regions to ports. Jute sacks became a crucial part of this infrastructure, used to transport cocoa from plantations to railheads, then to ports, and finally to international markets, particularly in Europe. For Mahama, these materials carry the imprint of colonial trade, labour, and unequal exchange. Installed in Kochi—a historic port city shaped by Indian Ocean trade—these sacks echo parallel histories of commodity exchange, colonial infrastructure, and labour exploitation across geographies. Mahama’s work draws these trade histories into conversation, revealing how distant the same imperial logic of extraction and circulation that bound regions together remains. 

Shared History of Colonial Countries

Divyesh Undaviya, a Goa-based visual artist visiting Kochi, points out that the materials used in the installation are sourced locally. The sacks, he notes, were historically used in Kochi as well—to transport spices, rice, and other commodities—just as similar sacks were used in Ghana to move coffee and cocoa beans. For Undaviya, this shared material history underscores how the suppression of labour and the exploitative logic of colonialism transcend national boundaries.

Not only the sacks, but even the wooden chairs arranged in the hall are locally sourced, bearing the marks of age and use. Their antiquity, he suggests, functions as a historical marker—signalling a past shaped by exploitation and erased labour. The architecture, enveloped almost entirely in sacks, creates the impression of being wrapped in history itself. By reusing these historical objects, Mahama attempts not simply to reconstruct space but to imagine repair. In that sense, Parliament of Ghosts gestures towards healing society: the “ghosts” evoke what is dead or past, yet when these objects are re-presented, they also open up the possibility of a different future, Undaviya adds.

Local women stitched together the sacks collected from the region, while old, broken chairs were brought to the site and repaired. Carpenters worked alongside students in assembling the installation, turning the process into a collective act of making. Workshops held as part of the project extended this collaboration, foregrounding labour, skill, and participation as integral to the work itself.

In an interaction in Kochi, Ibrahim Mahama reflected on the role of art at a time when tragedy continues to unfold in different forms across the world. “The questions art faced in the twentieth century are not the same questions we face today,” he said. “The conditions in Gaza, Sudan, and elsewhere force us to rethink what art can do, and what it must do. We are not experts. But we are not neutral either.” The statement encapsulates Mahama’s artistic philosophy—one that rejects detachment and insists on art’s ethical and political responsibility in the present.