If you have ever walked past a stack of rough brown cocoa or charcoal sacks at Kejetia or Agbogbloshie, you have already seen the raw material of Ibrahim Mahama’s €10,000 Arnold Bode Prize.
First, the name check for anyone new here: this is the 39-year-old Tamale-born conceptual artist who studied painting and sculpture at KNUST in Kumasi, not the mining and cement businessman.
Earlier this week, Germany's ambassador, Frederik Landshöft, and his wife Lisa had the arts crowd, Goethe-Institut staff and DAAD alumni at the German Residence in Accra to toast Mahama’s win, alongside Accra-based German visual artist Rebekka Macht.
Landshöft told the room his personal favourite among Mahama’s works is Parliament of Ghosts, a chamber built from discarded train seats and wooden lockers rescued from the old Sekondi railway yards that reminded him of 15 years around Germany’s Bundestag.
“What fascinates me most is the way you give objects from the past a new life, a new context and a new meaning,” Landshöft said.
That is the spine of Mahama’s practice. Instead of stretching fresh canvas, he collects worn jute sacks—originally woven in Asia, shipped to Ghana to haul cocoa beans, then patched up by charcoal traders—and stitches them into sheets with hundreds of collaborators.
At documenta 14 in 2017, he wrapped Kassel’s historic Torwache gatehouse buildings in those sacks, woven together with scrap from old Henschel locomotives, before taking up a DAAD fellowship in Berlin the same year.
On Thursday, October 29, the City of Kassel brought him back to the Kasseler Kunstverein to receive the 2026 Arnold Bode Prize, named after the curator who founded the documenta exhibition in 1955 and awarded since 1980.
That puts him on a winners’ list that includes Gerhard Richter and Maurizio Cattelan. His gallery, White Cube, says his show at the Fondation Cartier in Paris runs until February 2027.
You do not need a Schengen visa to see his biggest project, though. You just need a bus or flight to Tamale.
Rather than keeping his studio in Accra or London, Mahama used money from his international installations to build three public cultural spaces in northern Ghana, starting in 2019 with the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art (SCCA).
Two years later, he opened Nkrumah Voli-ni, turning an abandoned Kwame Nkrumah-era concrete grain silo complex into an underground exhibition space, library and sanctuary for the bats already living inside.
Out at Janna Kpeŋŋ near Tamale sits Red Clay Studio, where decommissioned aeroplanes and railway carriages serve as classrooms and studios for schoolchildren, even after a February fire destroyed one of the heritage trains during repair work.
“For you, the next generation is at the heart of what you are building,” Landshöft told him in Accra. Europe gets the stitched cocoa sacks; Tamale gets the studios for good.
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