The Pino Pascali Foundation is pleased to announce that the Pino Pascali Award 2021 – 23rd Edition- has been granted to Ibrahim Mahama (Tamale, Ghana 1987).

The jury, headed by Rosalba Branà, director of the Pino Pascali Foundation, Adrienne Drake, director of the Giuliani Foundation for Contemporary Art in Rome, and Nicola Zito, art historian and curator of the Pino Pascali Foundation, have explained their decision as follows:

“Ibrahim Mahama, a young artist from Ghana, has been playing an important role in the international art scene for the past few years. His main focus is on the human condition, on nomadism, on migrations and people’s exploitation.

His art has strong political connotations. Mahama contaminates art language from site specific installations to photography and assemblage, with the intention of making the audience reflect upon the failures of modern society.”
Ibrahim Mahama was born in 1987 in Tamale, Ghana. He studied painting and sculpture at Kwame Nkrumah University in Kumasi and graduated in 2013. His university years mark the beginning of a series of activities that reflect upon issues such as globalization of labour and of movement of goods, with artworks that he developed in collaboration with Ghanaian people.

Mahama currently lives and works between Accra and Tamale, where in 2019 he inaugurated the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art (SCCA), a gallery run by a group of artists and curators who work in Ghana. This was followed in September 2020 by the opening of the art space Red Clay, a vast complex in the nearby town of Janna Kpeŋŋ. Both art spaces include galleries, research facilities and residence for artists, and represent Mahama’s contribution to the development of contemporary art in his country. In April 2021, Mahama opened a renovated silo, Nkrumah Volini, in Tamale. This is the third art space that Mahama has created in the north of Ghana in the last two years.