Ibrahim Mahama’s The Harvest Season brings a rebuilt bottle factory to Paris
The Fondation Cartier exhibition opens on 22 October, bringing Mahama’s installations together with work by nine associated artists and collectives.
Ibrahim Mahama’s The Harvest Season is scheduled to open at the Fondation Cartier in Paris on 22 October, bringing a reconstructed Ghanaian bottle factory into an exhibition about industry, independence and possible futures. The Guardian reported the factory installation ahead of the opening; the Fondation Cartier says the exhibition will run until 28 February 2027.
Mahama bought the old factory in 2024 and rebuilt it for the Paris show, according to the Guardian’s art reviewer Eddy Frankel. He describes rusted steel roof beams reaching towards the ceiling and thousands of green bottles held in Coca-Cola, Schweppes, Kool and Club Minerals crates. Frankel reads the installation as a history of West African manufacturing and commerce after independence.
The artists joining Mahama at the Fondation Cartier
The Fondation Cartier says Mahama is exhibiting with nine associated artists and collectives. It describes the show in its new space as combining site-specific works with new versions of selected installations. The institution frames its subject around the political, cultural and social hopes of African independence in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as visions of what could follow.
The named participants include Dorothy Akpene Amenuke, Gideon Appah, James Barnor, the Congolese Plantation Workers Art League, Courage Dzidula Kpodo and Postbox Ghana, Zohra Opoku, Tjaša Rener and Feda Wardak, according to the Fondation Cartier. Their presence makes the exhibition more than a presentation of Mahama’s work alone.
The Guardian reports that Mahama runs three art centres near Tamale, Ghana, and that the Paris exhibition gives space to artists from his community, including mentors and collaborators. Frankel describes a long work of jute and bark by Amenuke, who taught Mahama in 2013, and a farmhouse wall built from red earth clay by artist and architect Kpodo.
Other works described by the Guardian include Appah’s paintings of imagined Ghanaian youths and chocolate sculptures by the Congolese Plantation Workers Art League. The sculptures were shaped in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and poured into moulds in Amsterdam, the newspaper reported. Frankel presents the collective’s work as part of an effort to reclaim land taken during the colonial era.
Visitors are also expected to encounter Mahama’s circular Parliament of Ghosts installation, which the Guardian describes as containing Asante stools. Together with the rebuilt factory, it places objects and materials tied to Ghana’s past inside a show that the Fondation Cartier says looks towards possible futures.
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Sources and context
- Why has a crumbling bottle plant been rebuilt in Paris? The stunning show suggesting the future is Ghana-shapedThe Guardian
- Ibrahim Mahama, The Harvest SeasonFondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain
AI-assisted article checked against the listed sources. NewsJaws did not conduct interviews or attend the reported events.