A conversation from October 2024 between Fruitmarket Director Fiona Bradley and Ibrahim Mahama, a Ghanaian artist critically acclaimed for his evocative large-scale, site-specific installations that speak to the cultural and social effects of post-colonialism and global migration.

Mahama’s 2024 Fruitmarket exhibition, Songs about Roses, was his first solo exhibition in Scotland. He worked with materials he collected from the now obsolete railway the British built in Ghana in 1923 to transport minerals and cocoa around the then Gold Coast. Large scale charcoal and ink drawings, sculpture and film bring the materials, histories and ghosts of this defunct railway back to Britain, re-installing it on top of the railway here in Edinburgh.

Mahama wraps politics and protest into his materials and methods. His Fruitmarket exhibition is named for a song by Scottish band Owl John: ‘we don’t need songs about roses/Please sing me something new … we don’t need songs about roses/All that we ask for is truth’.

Details on Songs about Roses can be found at the Fruitmarket online archive.

The book produced to accompany the exhibition is available to buy online from the Fruitmarket bookshop.

A film of this event is available on the Fruitmarket YouTube channel, where you can also find a discussion between Osei Bonsu, Curator of International Art at Tate, and Nana Biamah-Ofosu, Architecture, design and research practice, YAA Projects, along with Fruitmarket’s Fiona Bradley and Talbot Rice Gallery director Tessa Giblin, responding to Songs About Roses and El Anatsui: Scottish Mission Book Depot Keta, an exhibition by another contemporary Ghanian artist which showed in Edinburgh at the same time.

A free, public space for culture in the heart of Edinburgh, the Fruitmarket provides inspiration and opportunity for artists and audiences. We programme, develop and present world-class exhibitions, commissions, publications, performances, events and engagement activities, opening up the artistic process.

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