Dear Shaded Viewers,
There are seeds that take root in silence — in the hands that weave burlap, in the rust of forgotten industries, in the breath between histories. Ibrahim Mahama works from that silence. His art, born from the soil of Ghana and the pulse of its people, makes visible the invisible architecture of collective memory.
When the Fondation Cartier opens its doors to Le Temps des récoltes in autumn 2026, the Palais-Royal will no longer be a place of marble stillness but of living matter — an organism breathing with the rhythm of work, archive, ancestry, and rebirth. Mahama’s installations are not monuments but ecosystems, suspended between past and possibility. They whisper the labor of many hands, the language of reuse, the poetry of resistance.
From the north of Ghana to the heart of Paris, Mahama brings the spirit of Tamale — the learning centers he founded, the workshops where knowledge circulates like water, the young artists who turn discarded materials into visions of renewal. In Le Temps des récoltes, creation becomes both pedagogy and ritual: we sow together, we harvest together.
The exhibition unfolds as a constellation, not a hierarchy. It amplifies the voices of nine artists whose practices echo Mahama’s call for shared ground. Dorothy Akpene Amenuke, the first woman to teach at KNUST, threads jute into gestures of memory. Gideon Appah paints independence as dreamscape. James Barnor, eternal witness, reopens his Ever Young studio in a new century’s light. From Zohra Opoku’s textile portraits to the activist sculptures of the CATPC, from the speculative architecture of Courage Dzidula Kpodo and Postbox Ghana to the resonant structures of Feda Wardak — each work speaks to extraction, identity, restitution, and repair.
Mahama’s collaborations are more than companionship; they are acts of cultural reconstitution. The ghosts of colonial industry meet the artisans of the present. The museum becomes a commons. The jute sack — once vessel of cocoa and commerce — transforms into skin, shelter, story.
To witness Le Temps des récoltes is to stand in the long continuity of making — hands worn, materials reborn, time folding upon itself. It is an invitation to see art as a collective harvest: of ideas, of endurance, of faith in what can still grow.
Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain
2, place du Palais-Royal
75001 Paris
