In fall 2026, the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain is proud to present The harvest season, an exhibition on an unprecedented scale in France of Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama, accompanied by nine associate artists and collectives: Dorothy Akpene Amenuke, Gideon Appah, James Barnor, the Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC), Courage Dzidula Kpodo, Zohra Opoku, Postbox Ghana, Tjaša Rener and Feda Wardak.

It is in the past that we can excavate the potential of the future. The future isn’t something that just ‘exists’ somewhere, it also lives in our past memories, in the form of unrealized futures.

(Ibrahim Mahama)

For the Fondation Cartier, Ibrahim Mahama has imagined a living entity in resonance with the art centers he has founded in Tamale, northern Ghana. With the associate artists, he occupies all of the Fondation Cartier’s new space, with site-specific works, along with new versions of a selection of his iconic installations.

Since its creation, the Fondation Cartier has emerged as a place of dialogue, experimentation, and artistic exploration, open to emerging hubs of contemporary creation and the voices that comprise them. In the 1990s, it played a pioneering role in the presentation of artists from the African continent, such as Seydou Keïta, Bodys Isek Kingelez, Malick Sidibé, J. D. ’Okhai Ojeikere, and Chéri Samba. Following in these footsteps, The harvest season is Ibrahim Mahama’s first major exhibition in Paris, for which he has invited nine artists and collectives to join him.

Ibrahim Mahama (b. 1987 in Tamale, Ghana) has gained international recognition with installations made from collected materials, archives, and fragments of industrial heritage, which he reactivates to shape new imaginaries. Since the 2010s, he has developed a body of work that explores Ghana’s colonial and postcolonial legacies. Drawing on his country’s industrial and commercial history, he explores the circulation of goods, the transmission of craftsmanship and the preservation of heritage. His work also highlights political, social, and economic continuities and ruptures, with particular attention paid to infrastructure, traces of the past, and collective dynamics.

Conceived by Ibrahim Mahama with nine artists and collectives, all of whom have long-standing ties to him through collaborations, research or exchanges, The harvest season is a natural continuation of such an approach. It references the three art centers established by the artist in Tamale, northern Ghana, from 2019 onward. Designed as spaces for creation and transmission, while being rooted in the local environment, these centers have contributed to the emergence of a network of independent cultural institutions on the African continent, where pedagogy plays a central role. Ibrahim Mahama’s centers engage in dialogue with other such initiatives across Africa.

These include doual’art in Douala, Cameroon, founded in 1991 by Marilyn Douala Bell and Didier Schaub, which is considered a pioneer in the domain; the Centre for Contemporary Art Lagos (CCA) in Nigeria, opened in 2007 by Bisi Silva, RAW Material Company in Dakar, founded in 2008 by Koyo Kouoh, and more recently the Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute in Kenya, which was inaugurated in 2020 by Anglo-Kenyan artist Michael Armitage. All of these institutions have, each in their own way, invented new, sustainable models that engage and resonate with their environment. Echoing these initiatives, the exhibition takes an interest in the political, cultural, and social utopias formulated at the time of African independence in the 1950s and 1960s and seeks to reactivate these visions in order to question possible futures.