KMB-2025: Ibrahim Mahama’s ‘Parliament of Ghosts’ Awe-inspiring, Empowering

KOCHI:
A sack curtain at the short doorway beckons viewers to enter an ancient room in Anand Warehouse on Bazaar Road, Mattancherry. Stretches of sacks sewn together adorning the walls from ceiling to floor of the once abandoned godown generate myriad emotions and play with the mind. Below on the raised platform, repaired chairs of various makes and shapes stand in rows. Further down is the long rectangular stretch resembling the Well of the House.

Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama’s installation, Parliament of Ghosts (2017-ongoing), at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB) 2025 is a powerful in terms of narrative, scale, material and art of refurbishing abandoned structures, furniture, and fabric. Moreover, it invites public participation, and is also empowering.

Thirty-eight-year-old Mahama, who was placed on top of ArtReview Power 100 list for 2025, is a mentor as well. “Art is for the public and a space for art can be used before completion,” he had said while conducting workshops for art students and involving them in creating the Parliament of Ghosts.

It helped the participants expand their perspectives, understand the significance of selecting material and the scale of work and role of art in society. It helped empower housewives who cut and strung the gunny bags sourced locally into curtains. Master carpenters guided KMB interns, volunteers, and students in the art of repairing, reusing and repurposing the abandoned chairs sourced from various places in Kochi.

The Parliament of Ghosts can be viewed at different levels: as a space of art, a space for public participation, learning and debate to help think differently; a space to sensitise and empower society; an art demonstrating how to put abandoned spaces and things to good use in a land where poverty is high.

Also, it has to be viewed as a space where questions are raised on the role of parliament, a debate between the silent workers who help create the space and the noise-makers who occupy it, mostly with vested interests. It could be a parliament where the dead sacks and chairs relive as ghosts to tell stories of power mongering, colonial exploitation and extraction of the past and the exploitation in parliament today.

The eerie silence in the room speaks a lot about histories of power and politics. Mahama links colonial exploitation and extraction of jute, the golden fibre grown in India over 5,000 years ago and its role in industrialisation, growth of Dundee in Scotland and the changing patterns of global trade and economy. Farmers were forced to grow jute and India became the producer of raw jute and market for its products just as in the case of timber through exploitation of forests.

“Most objects I work with are embedded in historical labour forms steeped in colonial system of exploitation and extraction, to a point where they look dead and encapsulate memories” Mahama said.

The curtains on the walls relive images of labourers transporting the historic bags heavy with black gold (black pepper) and other spices, grains and wealth of the land, in backbreaking silence — only to see their role downplayed and discarded like the jute bags.

In the modern context, it triggers questions as to why poverty grows in a land where debates by people’s representatives ensconced in luxurious seats in the newly-built Parliament do not reach out to the needy, often muffling their voices. It also brings to the fore why the well-off stand to

gain while the poor have no say after exercising their right to vote. More such questions on the plight of the marginalised linger.

“My first Parliament project was exhibited in Manchester International Festival, second version in my hometown Tamale, Ghana, then in London, one here and I am working on one for Paris, each responding to the histories of the land,” said Mahama.

“India like Ghana had to go through a lot of pain and suffering during colonial times. How do we build a new generation, through cultural sensitivities? We are not footnotes in the story of the world but the main story; our labour and slavery helped create wealth in the West which they hardly recognise; a separation in dichotomy between historical condition and what it has created within the contemporary,” he explained, emphasising the need for art to engage with the public, touch the soul, inspire, and help transform society for the better.