The Memory of Love

The Frac des Pays de la Loire invites the Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama to carry out an original project between sculpture and painting, installation and architecture.

Have you ever walked in a returned space? A space where what surrounds you seems to turn its back on you? The work of Ibrahim Mahama (born in 1987 in Tamale, northern Ghana) precisely plays with the meaning of objects, structures and even history. With his productions, Ibrahim Mahama seeks to occupy spaces emptied by history. He uses the materiality of objects to transmit memories and a fortiori memories, buried, forbidden, hidden. He collects, diverts, returns, assembles, suspends.

Through the accumulation of traditional materials and used objects until their near destruction, Ibrahim Mahama observes how the body remains visible in all these signs of wear: the burlap bag, emptied of its contents, bears sweat, writing, the tearing of men. Faced with the stories of these bodies in suspension, the artist also suggests another body: that of the viewer. How does the body react to a mass that unfolds in its gravity? Because, with Ibrahim Mahama, space is understood as a volume, never as a plane. This volume allows the meeting of bodies in a cartography that mixes the layers of history as much as the continents.