Ibrahim Mahama: "Digging Stars"
- Edward Mitterrand
- Jan 23
- 2 min read
Join us for an exclusive evening to mark the unveiling of Digging Stars, the first solo exhibition in Southeast Asia by Ibrahim Mahama, presented during Singapore Art Week 2026. This exhibition invites guests to experience a major body of work by one of today’s most influential artists, whose large-scale installations transform found materials into powerful reflections on labour, trade and global exchange. Presented by The Pierre Lorinet Collection and curated by Edward Mitterrand, the exhibition brings together new and recent works, extending Mahama’s ongoing investigation into global trade, material circulation, and the social histories embedded in everyday objects. Set within the context of Singapore, long a nexus of circulation and commerce, the exhibition offers a rare opportunity to encounter Mahama’s work in dialogue with the city’s own layered histories.
During Singapore Art Week, Ibrahim Mahama presents a powerful solo exhibition that confirms his position as one of the most influential artists working today. Staged across key venues in Singapore, the show brings together large-scale installations made from jute sacks, industrial remnants and found materials that once circulated through global systems of trade.
Mahama’s works are physically imposing yet deeply human. The weathered sacks, previously used to transport cocoa, rice or charcoal-bear stains, stamps and repairs that speak of labour, migration and economic exchange. Reassembled into monumental structures, they transform ordinary materials into living archives of postcolonial histories and global capitalism. Rather than erasing their past, Mahama foregrounds it: every tear, seam and discoloration becomes part of the narrative.
In Singapore, a city shaped by trade and flows of goods, the work resonates with particular intensity. Mahama’s installations echo the infrastructures that sustain global commerce while quietly questioning who benefits from them and who is rendered invisible. His practice bridges continents, linking West Africa’s industrial and agricultural histories with Southeast Asia’s role in global supply chains.
Beyond their political charge, the works are tactile and immersive. Visitors move through and around them, encountering art not as distant objects but as environments that demand bodily and emotional engagement. This emphasis on material presence reflects Mahama’s belief that art can function as a site of memory: one that connects people, places and time.
The Singapore exhibition underscores Mahama’s broader project: to use art as a means of re-reading history and reimagining value. By elevating discarded materials into monumental forms, he challenges conventional ideas of worth, authorship and permanence. What emerges is not a static exhibition, but a space of connection, between past and present, local and global, material and meaning.
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