Ibrahim Mahama’s Harvest Season Builds a Future From Shared Memory

Ibrahim Mahama brings the histories inside everyday materials into a collective conversation about what comes next.

Ibrahim Mahama’s The Harvest Season opened at Fondation Cartier on October 22, bringing Ghanaian history, artistic collaboration and the possibilities of cultural institutions into focus. The Paris exhibition runs through February 28, 2027.

The Fondation Cartier presentation occupies the institution’s new space with Mahama and nine associated artists and collectives. Its ambition reaches beyond introducing a celebrated artist to a new audience. By placing collaboration inside the exhibition’s structure, it asks visitors to consider who produces cultural value, who preserves it and where that value can travel.

Materials carry people with them

Mahama’s artist profile at White Cube traces his use of jute sacks through networks of trade and work. Produced in Southeast Asia and used in Ghana’s cocoa trade before circulating into other uses, the sacks accumulate marks from handling and transport. Stitched together and placed against architecture, their worn surfaces bring those journeys into public view.

That material history changes the way an installation can be read. A fabric’s texture might first attract the eye, but the decisions behind its collection and reuse open another set of questions. Who handled it? What was carried? What becomes visible when an object no longer needs to perform its original job? The artwork gives viewers a reason to linger over evidence that commerce usually passes along.

White Cube also documents Mahama’s institution-building in northern Ghana: the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art, Red Clay and Nkrumah Volini. The projects put education and gathering alongside artistic production. That background matters when looking at a major international exhibition. The museum appearance belongs to a wider practice with places, collaborators and audiences beyond Paris.

Archival film: In The Gallery: Ibrahim Mahama New York 2024, courtesy of White Cube. This is not footage of The Harvest Season at Fondation Cartier.

An exhibition made through relationships

The museum’s curatorial outline connects the show to these institutions and to unrealized political and cultural possibilities associated with African independence. Among the invited participants are photographer James Barnor, textile artist Dorothy Akpene Amenuke, painter Gideon Appah, Zohra Opoku and the Congolese collective CATPC. Their different practices make the idea of a shared history more demanding than a single visual signature.

Collaboration also complicates the familiar museum story of an isolated genius. An exhibition can make room for teachers, elders, peers and collective work without pretending their perspectives are identical. For a viewer, the useful question becomes how those distinct approaches meet: through a material, an archive, an institution or a relationship that has developed over time.

A related James Barnor presentation at Galerie Valois, inside the Palais-Royal–Musée du Louvre metro station, expands that conversation. Running October 19 through March 31, it presents photographs and contact sheets connected to his work with Drum magazine in the 1960s. The museum describes images where African diasporic experience and London street style meet. Its transport setting offers a different encounter with photographs than a conventional gallery visit.

Keep looking beyond the headline

The October 2026 exhibition catalogue includes contributions from Mahama and the curators, an artist conversation and Bernard Akoi-Jackson’s essay on KNUST’s intellectual and institutional history. It provides a route into the relationships behind the display rather than reducing the show to its scale.

This is an introduction based on the organizers’ materials, not an eyewitness review. Installation atmosphere, audience responses and the experience of moving between works remain for on-site reporting. What the verified framework already offers is substantial: a way to think about cultural memory as something people work with, teach through and rebuild together.


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