but your practice seems more aesthetically tuned than his; is this an African thing, being able to give conceptually rigorous work a strong visual aesthetic? IM: No, I don’t think it’s an African thing. I tend to think about the work holistically, or in a universal sense. There is no separation, in my mind, between how my practice functions and how it looks. Comparisons have been made in the past between my work and Christo’s. Formally there are obvious relationships that can be drawn, but it is a lazy comparison that does not take into account the motivations for, or processes involved in, the making the work. Jacques Rancière and Walter Benjamin talk about acts of production and the role of the author in those processes, and it is these motivations and acts that make up a core component of my finished work. The revolutionary teachings of karikacha seid’ou, from the Department of Painting and Sculpture at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, have been instrumental in the development of ideas within my creative practice too. Most of the buildings I work with are modernist in origin; it is not a purely African thing. There is an agreement, a conversation that occurs between the existing architectural forms, their particular contexts and the forms rendered by the subsequent intervention. RB: Dressing in sackcloth is seen as an acknowledgment of shame. Are you shaming these buildings and spaces? IM: One of the things my work addresses is the failure of architecture in the late 20th and 21st centuries. Architects often take little account of the body, or the way bodies integrate with the spaces they construct. My worry is that in cities like Caracas, Lagos and Accra – or in other places where there are large slums – the state, rather than being a protagonist for the people, becomes an antagonist, by favouring gentrification over human welfare. I have inherited and grown up within this environment of failure, and as an artist I ask myself how I can take this failure and subvert it, how it might lead into change? Crisis and failure are points of departure for me. RB: Have you become a connoisseur of sacking? IM: Not just sacks, there are many objects that I collect. When buildings are demolished I collect debris from them – the iron rods, window sections and other fragments of tropical modernist architecture – to use in the construction of new spaces. RB: As an artist, I imagine you are impelled to take risks and therefore to deliberately court failure. How then do you navigate your practice when you are working with institutions, which, of course, expect unbridled success when they commission a project from you? relation to my work is because of how African art – and other art forms outside the western canon – have been read in the recent past. They have often been labelled as emerging from cultural necessity. I think there is a bigger picture than that, which should be taken into account. When considering the human condition, issues such as spirituality are just part of the whole; they are never the whole picture, in themselves.
IM: When I am invited to make work by an institution, compromise inevitably becomes part of the process of the work’s development. It is true, working with institutions, there is often very little room for failure. With an institution I am there to build something and there is a readymade audience who will see it. When I do an independent project, however, the audience, who I think of as actors, are inscribed within the materials and the architecture that go into the formation of the work. It is all very different when I choose a space myself in which to work from scratch and a particular group of collaborators to work with. RB: Is there a spiritual aspect to your practice?
RB: A practice such as yours is so much about the first hand, complete experience of being there: that is in the space, with the smell of
IM: No, there is not. The reason I brush off associations of spirituality in
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