Ghanaian Ibrahim Mahama is the first African to top the annual list of artistic powers | art

Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama has become the first African to be named the most influential person in the art world in ArtReview magazine’s annual power list.

Mahama, whose works often use found materials including textile remains, topped the ranking of the most influential people and organizations in the world of contemporary art as chosen by an international jury.

He told The Guardian he was humbled to be named at the top of the list, which he first heard about while studying at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Ghana in 2011, when Chinese dissident Ai Weiwei topped the ranking.

“For me to be a part of this, especially coming from a place like Ghana, which for many years was like we weren’t even part of the discourse, is very humbling,” he said.

Mahama, who resides in the northern Ghanaian city of Tamale, said he hopes his success will inspire young artists in his country “to realize that they are part of the contemporary discourse and not just on the margins.”

Mark Rabolt, ArtReview’s editor-in-chief, said Mahama’s selection indicated that the seat of power was shifting in the art world.

“I think you can also look at this as saying that there is a realignment of the status of global finance… I cannot say that the art world is separate from those worlds. The Middle East and North Africa region has historically been a bridge between East and West,” he said.

The top ten list includes many artists and curators from the Middle East and Africa. Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, one of the most powerful women in Qatar and head of Qatar Museums since 2006, ranks second, partly due to her enormous purchasing power.

Last year, Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi, President and Director of the Sharjah Art Foundation in the United Arab Emirates, fell two places to third place, and Egyptian artist Wael Shawqi came in fourth place.

Rounding out the top ten were Ho Tzu Nien from Singapore (5), Americans Amy Sherald (6), Kerry James Marshall (7), and Saadia Hartmann (8), UK-based Forensic Architecture Group (9), and Wolfgang Tillmans from Germany (10).

Mahama has had an incredibly busy couple of years. Represented by Apalazzo Gallery and the influential White Cube galleries, his practice includes the use of old hospital beds, discarded train cars, and other artefacts that he transforms into objects of art.

At last year’s Edinburgh Festival, Mahama’s Songs About Roses, which focused on the rise and fall of the railway built by the British government in Ghana between 1898 and 1923, was described as “as extraordinary as a great magical realist novel”.

Jonathan Jones of The Guardian said the work’s treatment of the ghosts of history “places Mahama up there with William Kentridge and Anselm Kiefer as one of today’s most important artists.”

A few months before opening his gallery in Edinburgh, Mahama covered the Barbican with a 2,000-square-metre hot pink fabric, stitched together on a football pitch in Ghana because it was too big.

In 2019, Mahama opened the Savannah Contemporary Art Center in Tamale, a 900 square meter site that is an exhibition space, library, residence space, archive and studio.

Many high-profile artists run programs in their local communities, Rabolt said. He said of Mahama: “He acts not only with this classic idea of ​​the lone artist producing his own flashes of genius, but also as someone who is part of the community.”

Thirty anonymous experts from around the world compile the annual power rankings, which have been running for 24 years.