Kunsthalle Bern Wrapped: Ibrahim Mahama Echoes Christo and Jeanne-Claude With Jute Sack Installation
Mahama adds a jute cloth twist to the famed first building wrapping by Christo and Jeanne‑Claude in 1968. Save to My Ocula
This April, Ibrahim Mahama will follow in the footsteps of artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude as he wraps a Swiss museum in jute sackcloth.
In an echo of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s first building wrapping at Kunsthalle Bern in 1968, Mahama will help the museum celebrate its first upgrade with his own version of the installation, based on his famed jute sack installations.
The Ghanaian artist will wrap the Swiss museum ahead of its reopening in June following ten months of construction to improve accessibility—its first renovation since its inception in 1918—that also saw the institution rethink its public programmes and legacy.
The museum said the wrapping will interrogate the Kunsthalle’s imprint on national memory and its impact on the city’s artistic and architectural landscape.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude packaged the Kunsthalle with 2,430 square metres of reinforced polyethene secured with three kilometres of nylon rope. A single slit at the entrance enabled visitors access to works by a dozen other artists invited to exhibit.
Kunsthalle Bern’s approval of their project had been radical at the time, as similar proposals by the artists never materialised, facing opposition from property owners, museum administrations, and permit-granting government offices worldwide.
At the time, insurance companies refused to underwrite the wrapped building and its contents, leading the museum to place six watchmen on 24-hour surveillance around the building.
The cost of this saw the museum bid farewell to the installation just a week in.
But now, Mahama has updated the idea to discuss his country’s labour conditions and ecological shifts via the jute sack—a material representing the history of postcolonial Ghana for the artist through its use as a carrier of Ghanaian exports like the cacao Swiss chocolatiers purchased.
‘I’m interested in art for the sake of life itself,’ the artist told Ocula in 2024, adding that ‘we must try to create contexts and forms that can allow discourses to thrive.’
His first solo presentation in Switzerland will be on view from 30 April to 1 June 2025. —[O]
Main image: Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Wrapped Kunsthalle Bern (1968) (archive image). 2,430 square metres of reinforced polyethylene and nylon rope. Courtesy Kunsthalle Bern. Photo: Balthasar Burkhard.
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