{"id":167286,"date":"2025-12-04T06:50:07","date_gmt":"2025-12-04T06:50:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/167286\/"},"modified":"2025-12-04T06:50:07","modified_gmt":"2025-12-04T06:50:07","slug":"ghanas-ibrahim-mahama-first-african-to-top-annual-art-power-list-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/167286\/","title":{"rendered":"Ghana\u2019s Ibrahim Mahama first African to top annual art power list | Art"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama<\/a> has become the first African to be named the most influential figure in the art world in ArtReview magazine\u2019s annual power list.<\/p>\n

Mahama, whose work often uses found materials including textile remnants, topped the ranking of the contemporary art world\u2019s most influential people and organisations as chosen by a global judging panel.<\/p>\n

He told the Guardian he felt humbled to be named at the top of a list he first heard about while studying at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Ghana in 2011, when the Chinese dissident Ai Weiwei topped the ranking<\/a>.<\/p>\n

He said: \u201cFor me to be part of this, especially coming from a place like Ghana<\/a>, which for many years was almost as if we were not even part of the discourse, is quite humbling.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mahama, who is based in Ghana\u2019s northern city of Tamale, said he hoped his success could inspire younger artists in his country to \u201crealise that they are part of the contemporary discourse and not just on the sideline\u201d.<\/p>\n

Mark Rappolt, ArtReview\u2019s editor-in-chief, said the choice of Mahama indicated that the seat of power was shifting in the world of art.<\/p>\n

He said: \u201cI think you could also look at that as saying there\u2019s a realignment of where global finance sits \u2026 I wouldn\u2019t say that the art world is separate from those worlds. The MENA region has historically always been a bridge between east and west.\u201d<\/p>\n

The power list\u2019s top 10 features several artists and curators from the Middle East and Africa<\/a>. Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, one of the most powerful women in Qatar and the chair of Qatar Museums since 2006, is at No 2, in part due to her immense purchasing power.<\/p>\n

Last year\u2019s No 1, Sheikha Hoor al-Qasimi, the president and director of the Sharjah Art Foundation in the United Arab Emirates, slips two places to No 3, and the Egyptian artist Wael Shawky comes in at No 4.<\/p>\n

Singapore\u2019s Ho Tzu Nyen<\/a> (5), the Americans Amy Sherald<\/a> (6), Kerry James Marshall<\/a> (7) and Saidiya Hartman (8), the UK-based group Forensic Architecture<\/a> (9) and Germany\u2019s Wolfgang Tillmans<\/a> (10) round out the top 10.<\/p>\n

Mahama has had an incredibly busy couple of years. He is represented by the influential Apalazzo Gallery and White Cube galleries and his practice includes using old hospital beds, discarded train carriages and other artefacts that he turns into art objects.<\/p>\n

Last year at the Edinburgh festival, Mahama\u2019s Songs About Roses, which focused on the rise and fall of the railway that the British government built in Ghana between 1898 and 1923, was described as being \u201cas extraordinary as a great magic-realist novel\u201d.<\/p>\n

The Guardian\u2019s Jonathan Jones said<\/a> the work\u2019s reckoning with history\u2019s ghosts \u201cputs Mahama up there with William Kentridge and Anselm Kiefer as one of today\u2019s most important artists\u201d.<\/p>\n

Mahama\u2019s work Purple Hibicus at the Barbican in 2023. Photograph: David Levene\/The Guardian<\/p>\n

A few months before his Edinburgh show opened, Mahama draped the Barbican<\/a> in 2,000 sq metres of bright pink fabric, which had been stitched together in a football field in Ghana because it was so large.<\/p>\n

In 2019, Mahama opened the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art in Tamale, a 900 sq metre site that is an exhibition space, library, residency space, archive and studio.<\/p>\n

Rappolt said many of the highest-ranking artists ran programmes in their local communities. He said of Mahama: \u201cHe\u2019s not acting as this classic idea of the sole artist producing his own the flashes of genius, but also as a person who\u2019s part of a community.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thirty anonymous experts from around the world compiled the annual power ranking, which has been running for 24 years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama has become the first African to be named the most influential figure in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":167287,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[437,434,435,436,438,146,85,46],"class_list":{"0":"post-167286","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-artsdesign","12":"tag-design","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-il","15":"tag-israel"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167286","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=167286"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167286\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/167287"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=167286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=167286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=167286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}