VOLI-NI by Ibrahim Mahama

‘VOLI-NI’, the personal exhibition of the Ghanaian visual artist Ibrahim Mahama, inaugurates the new spaces of E.ART.H. in Verona, together with STAGED, The photographic exhibition dedicated to the Dutch photographer and director Anton Corbijn.
This unprecedented exhibition project, curated by Eva Brioschi, is designed specifically for the spaces of E.ART.H. and includes a large installation that fully occupies the long corridor on the first floor.
The title chosen for this Italian solo exhibition – which follows the large public intervention at the Porta Venezia toll booths in Milan in 2019 and the participation at the Venice Biennale the same year – borrows a term from the Ghanaian dialect: “Voli-ni“, which literally means “inside the hole“.
In 2021, Mahama bought old silos built by President Kwame Nkrumah (the enlightened president who led Ghana to independence in 1957) in the early 1960s for storing cocoa and other seeds, which remained unused after his deposition. Created with the intention of making the country autonomous and independent in the management of its agricultural resources, these silos were abandoned after Nkrumah’s deposition and then filled with sand, to be unusable and inaccessible. These examples of Brutalist architecture were recovered by the artist to be rescued from oblivion and returned to the community, converted into cultural centres.

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