When the Polaroid Foundation announced its collaboration with Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama for The 20×24 Project, it was more than a pairing of an iconic camera with a celebrated name. It was a meeting of two philosophies: one mechanical, one deeply human; both committed to making the invisible visible, one exposure at a time.
The resulting YouTube film, released March 13, 2025, puts one of today’s most consequential artists behind a camera that produces images almost as permanent and immediate as the marks it sets out to document.
Born in 1987 in Tamale, Ghana, Ibrahim Mahama has spent his career building a practice that is equal parts art and archaeology. He is best known for monumental installations made from jute sacks used to transport cocoa beans and charcoal; commodities that tell the story of Ghana’s economic dependency in fabric and stitch. His 2015 Venice Biennale installation Out of Bounds, which wrapped vast walls of the Arsenale in stitched sacks bearing traders’ names, earned him global recognition and a place on Frieze’s list of the 25 best artworks of the 21st century.
More recently, his work has expanded to locomotives, food silos, headpans; infrastructure as artifact, repurposed to expose the ongoing entanglements of colonialism and capital. His 2025 Kunsthalle Wien work features a hollowed-out diesel locomotive, purchased by Ghana via IMF loans, sitting atop thousands of traditional headpans. It is a sculpture as balance sheet; haunting, precise, and impossible to ignore.
“Mahama’s work addresses issues of labour, extraction and exploitation. He makes use of his position in a global art world to reflect back on those issues practically, creating educational and art institutions while establishing collaborative partnerships.”
– ArtReview Power 100, 2025
In 2025, ArtReview named Mahama the most influential figure in contemporary art; the first person from the African continent to top the Power 100 in its history. His climb from 14th in 2024 to the summit in 2025 reflects not just the reach of his artwork, but the significance of what he has built at home.
Rather than relocating to New York, London, or Berlin, Mahama has funneled the proceeds of blue-chip gallery sales back into a self-built cultural ecosystem in Tamale: Red Clay Studio, the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art (SCCA), and Nkrumah Volini; a repurposed brutalist food silo. Together they host residencies, children’s workshops, archival projects, and international exhibitions. They are functioning institutions reshaping what contemporary African art looks like when it develops on its own terms.
The Camera
The 20×24 Studio camera stands nearly two metres tall, weighs over 100 kilograms, and produces prints that measure a full 20 by 24 inches. Only six were ever built, between 1976 and 1978; five remain in use today. The camera began as a marketing demonstration for Polaroid’s professional color film and became, over five decades, one of the most storied instruments in photography.
Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe, Chuck Close, Sally Mann, Carrie Mae Weems, Robert Frank; the list of artists who have worked with the 20×24 reads like a survey of the American art canon. The Polaroid Foundation, which restored one of the surviving cameras in 2022 alongside a completely new film, enlisted the camera’s legendary operator John Reuter; who has worked with the machine since 1980, to make it available to a new generation of artists worldwide.
The 20×24 Project’s mandate is deliberately open: artist-led, location-flexible, medium-specific. No retouching, no editions, no post-production. Each exposure is a unique, irreversible event; chemistry responding to light in real time.
The Subject: Tattoos, Migration & the Body as Document
For his 20×24 session, Mahama turned to a subject he has returned to across years and multiple bodies of work: the tattoos worn by migrant women and girls from Ghana’s rural north as they travel south for work. These are not decorative marks. They are functional inscriptions; a substitute for bureaucratic systems that were never built to serve these communities.
In much of rural Ghana, tattooing a family name or place of birth onto the forearm is a practical response to the absence of identification papers. The body itself becomes the document: permanent, portable, and beyond the reach of any administrative system that might fail or exclude you.
“I look at the relationship between the body, tattoos, and the maps created by the British. The scars remind us of traditional identity markings found within local tribes.”
– Ibrahim Mahama
In earlier iterations of this work, Mahama overlaid photographs of tattooed arms onto historic colonial maps; routes and regions drawn by British administrators who never consulted the people living within them. Others were photographed against decaying leather seats salvaged from Gold Coast Railway cars. The tension between state cartography and bodily inscription is the point: official geography versus the geography people carry on their skin.
On the 20×24, those forearms become monumental. A single exposure produces a print as large as a painting; immediately, irreversibly, without manipulation. The format doesn’t just document the tattoo. It honors the scale of what it represents.
The Collaborators
Red Clay Studio
Mahama’s Tamale-based artist studio and production hub
SCCA Tamale
Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art – exhibitions, residencies, community programs
Nkrumah Volini
Repurposed brutalist silo space; gallery and community arts venue
James Barnor Archives
Ghana’s first full-time newspaper photographer; 32,000+ images spanning independence-era Ghana and 1960s London
Fondation Cartier
Paris-based institution championing artists from Africa and the Global South
ArtReview + Polaroid
Global critical recognition meets the foundation stewarding photography’s most singular camera
The presence of the James Barnor Archives is particularly resonant. Barnor – Ghana’s first full-time newspaper photographer, who introduced color processing to the country in the 1970s, built a visual archive of a nation in transition. His 32,000-plus images are the photographic memory of Ghana across its most pivotal era. By situating his 20×24 work in dialogue with that archive, Mahama places his own photographic practice within the longer arc of Ghanaian visual history: not importing a tradition, but extending one that already existed.
There is something philosophically exact about Mahama choosing a medium defined by immediacy and irreversibility to document a practice that is also immediate and irreversible. The Polaroid print and the tattoo are both produced in a single committed act. Neither can be undone. Both carry time on their surface.
Polaroid itself is another layer of this archaeology. The corporation that built the 20×24 went bankrupt in 2001. The foundation now stewarding the camera is, in its own way, a salvage operation; rescuing something of lasting value from the ruins of an institution, just as Mahama does with jute sacks, train hulks, and decommissioned food silos. The parallels are not incidental. They are the whole point.
Mahama’s rise to the top of the Power 100 is a signal that the most important conversations in contemporary art are no longer centered in the cities that once claimed that right. They are happening in Tamale. They are being carried on the forearms of migrant women making their way south. And now, for one very large, very deliberate photograph at a time, they are being made instant.
Watch Now
The Ibrahim Mahama episode of The 20×24 Project is available now on the Polaroid Foundation’s YouTube channel.