This work continues Mahama’s material investigation into labour, economic history and production. Taking an almost forensic approach, the artist sees the surfaces of these materials as holding and bearing the physical markers, smells and traces of the networks and industries they previously moved through. This installation differs from other projects in which the artist blankets the exterior architecture of public buildings. In covering the interior of Turbine Hall, Mahama creates a conceptual space for us to walk inside, and from within which to consider our own relationship to the layered histories on display through a heightened, bodily engagement with the space.

Public art’s main virtue is to exist beyond the imposed hierarchies of museums and galleries. Out in the open the works, orphans of preconceptions, confront an unacquainted public, perhaps igniting a sense of wonder. Ibrahim Mahama’s spectacular installations of sewn charcoal sacks are the result of his investigation into the conditions of the body in relation to both architecture and history. The practice takes many forms and one of the final products – the art – is displayed in marketplaces, thus defying the artefacts’ intrinsic value system. Mahama produces the large draping surfaces by carefully assembling sacks imported by the Ghana Cocoa Board and repurposed by charcoal sellers.

The sacks present patches, markings and traces of traders’ names and locations on their rough brown skin, which map out the many transits they endure as vessels of commodities. Wrapped around heaps of merchandise in the marketplace or embracing the contours of a museum building,

spreads of jute fibres become an oversized socio-political inquiry into the origin of materials, referencing what is normally hidden for the sake of concept or form. Mahama denudes the transits and ownerships of jute sacks along their lives as porters of goods, rendering visible the mechanisms of trade which define the world’s economy. For the 22nd Biennale of Sydney, Mahama presents a largescale immersive installation, dressing the entirety of the interior of Turbine Hall at Cockatoo Island with jute sacks. A crowded patchwork of rich, brown colour and rough and smooth planes, together their hardened surfaces mime the gritty materiality and architecture of the former shipyard and penal colony, to reference and stir the histories of labor and incarceration laying dormant on the island