Bridging connections

Here is a conceit to contemplate: All art is a trick or, in the grander scheme of things, a sequence of subversions.

This, then, is the setting of a “national” Malaysian classroom after independence, and into the late 1980s, after which the pursuit of worldliness was replaced with the race after the machine, which has appeared to become learning’s quest.

Among the cultural dimensions of that “benign” experiment — the Commonwealth — was a marvellous collection of literature from the new nations of post-colonial Africa, collected under a shelf entitled the Heinemann African Writers Series.

See also: WINGS by Eunice Yeo offered for auction to support the Singapore Red Cross

It is from here that such classics emerged — Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, the first in the Africa trilogy that would include the other classics Arrow of God and No Longer At Ease.

Wole Soyinka, who would be the first African Nobel laureate, would publish his first novel The Interpreters as part of the series. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o published his searing A Grain of Wheat before forsaking writing in English for his native tongue of Gikuyu.

See also: John Tung, curator of S.E.A Focus 2026

And as apartheid in South Africa grew in greater world consciousness, Nadine Gordimer (a later African laureate) would publish Crime of Conscience.

There were other names — Alex La Guma, Dennis Brutus and Ali Mazrui.

Among the books in the series that found their way into our classrooms as prescribed literature were the Sudanese writer Tayeb Salih’s haunting Season of Migration to the North, and an especially moving Ghanaian novel — memorable even for the spelling of its title, which seemed to rest on the tongue rather than conform to conventional script — Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. In its delicate patterns of speech, evocations of landscape and finely rendered, painful experiences, the novel contains the lines:

“The sand looked so beautiful then, so many little individual grains in the light of the night, giving the watcher the childhood feeling of infinite things finally understood, the humiliating feeling of the watcher’s nothingness.”

Imagine standing at the tollgates of Porta Venezia in Milan, Italy, the mammoth structures shrouded in jute sacks — a testament to architecture, material and the chain of makers that contributed to their making — provoking, in equal measure, elation and derision.

Or at the Barbican in London, a pride of Britain’s Brutalist age, the complex wrapped in swathes of pink fabric for Ibrahim’s grand creation, beautifully titled Pink Hibiscus.
“It contrasts with the grey British sky!” ran the headline in The Guardian.

For more lifestyle, arts and fashion trends, click here for Options Section

It would be naïve, even disingenuous, to simply call Ibrahim Mahama an artist. True, he began as a conventional painter until the bug of “material” inflicted him. Material — the maker, the history of the making, the connections, the memory encapsulated in each and every object, and like the classical pantheist, the search for a “life in everything”.

“At some point you realise materials are so complex,” he said some time ago upon receiving the Prince Claus Award, “and there are a lot of memories and symbolisms and sights, spaces, history, memories that are somehow trapped within these objects.”

The obsession with material and object has not only inspired an art that revolves, increasingly, around the scale of things, the gathering of whole collectives in their making but also in the quintessential act of collecting. In many ways, Mahama personifies all the virtues of the hoarder and the increasingly lost tradition of that art of hoarding, which keep an enduring belief that in “there” is something.

All manner of material has found its way into his “making” — mesh grids for smoking fish; the wood boxes of shoe-shiners; salvaged hospital beds; timber reclaimed from colonial railway for a grand installation called the Parliament of Ghosts; swathes of fabric, which, for Purple Hibiscus, included urine stains; and always jute sacks, most of which are made in Southeast Asia.
“With most of the materials I work with, it’s not as if I’m a genius and I just came up with it,” Mahama told The New York Times. “There are things that you encounter all the time, and one day there’s a moment when you think, if this thing and that thing come together, this new form might be made.

The labour of many people has already gone into it. As an artist, you’re just borrowing from that and recontextualising.”

The politics of Mahama’s art reaches deep — not just into the particular history of sub-Saharan Africa, notably the slave trade on which the foundations of modern capitalism were born but the built culture reflected also in his architectural imaginings, installations, collages, works on fabric as well as the paintings and photographs impressed in them.

Part of what continues to make Mahama’s art at once irresistible and transcending easy categorisation is its elusiveness and unpredictability. The monumental, the modest, the radical shifts in settled material continue to define its “restlessness”. Yet, for all its lurches towards monumentalism, grand histories and connections, there is a single, simple constant that is ever present — texture.

“Things [can] start with something really simple, like texture, or maybe I go into some of these classrooms and see a blackboard and I find it has really interesting patterns, because they are old,” Mahama explains in an interview accompanying his exhibition Lazarus, held at the White Cube Gallery in 2021.

With Digging Stars, that keen sense of texture and surface is ever present. Organised by Art Outreach Singapore in collaboration with collector and philanthropist Pierre Lorinet, the show presents “a new suite of fabric-based works, collages, photographs and video that trace Ghana’s material legacies of colonialism, post-colonialism and industrialisation. Through these assemblages, Mahama repositions discarded materials as witnesses to hidden histories, prompting reflection on the global systems that connect people, economies and places”.

In Digging Stars, as with the many exhibitions that have made the “art circuit”, elevating Mahama to that status of “most influential figure”, the idea of exhibition passes into that of a visceral and tactile experience, where art converges with history, memory, the poetics of a title, the archivists’ acute sense of detail and the archaeologist’s sense of the expansiveness.The Ibrahim Mahama experience may well be encapsulated in an observation by the director of the House of World Cultures in Berlin, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung: “This brother wants to go far. His time scale is 1,000 years.”