In Dependence is borrowed from the title of Nigerian novelist Sarah Ldipo Manyinka’s book “In Dependence”, 2008, set in Nigeria in the early 1960s. It combines both love and failure as a starting point towards rebuilding faith within a place amidst crisis and uncertainty. Ibrahim Mahama is interested in the parallel histories of post-independent states of the period and their influence on the aesthetics of society, the transformation of objects and spaces they once occupied or still occupy. The element of decay is used as a starting point for reflection and production.
Ibrahim Mahama always reflects on materials, politics and daily life through his choice of objects and sites. The artist works with traditional materials and exchanges objects from Ghana: charcoal sacks, cast-off clothes, shoemaker boxes, scrap-like materials, and maps and puts them together to reflect on spaces within a deeply politically intent informed purely by the forms within the work. Traditional materials become part of new and old spaces. The artist uses architecture as the starting premise for his work, turning it into something new and re-reading it differently.
