Jason Sondhi
I am, sadly, not as up to speed on the art scene as I was as a younger man, and the name “Ibrahim Mahama” was foreign to me upon my initial watching of Dear Home of Scars. Suffice to say, I am now a big fan of the artist, who is currently the toast of the art world. In 2025, Mahama became the first African to top ArtReview’s Power 100 list, while also receiving “Artist of the Year” from Art Basel. These honors represent a rapid rise to the pinnacle of the field since his breakout exhibition at the 2015 Venice Biennale.
This 20min short doc catches the now-almost 40-year-old artist just before these honors, as Mahama returned to his hometown of Tamale in Northern Ghana to work on a large-scale installation at the community center/art studio he has founded. If the goal of an artist profile doc is simply to introduce you to a neat person, a character you like, and work that you admire, then mission accomplished! Marina Meijer, a Dutch documentarian working for the interesting arts and science non-profit Ammodo, has produced a piece that thoughtfully introduces an exciting artist and gives space for an appreciation of his work.
“By treating the train as both narrator and character, the film creates a poetic perspective on colonial history, memory, and identity.” – Director Marina Meijer
Longtime readers know that I have slightly more expansive requirements for a profile doc, however. My framework for evaluation possesses three pillars: the hook, the subject’s performance on-camera, and the ‘filmmaking’.
Mahama’s institutional validation satisfies the hook, and Meijer’s filmmaking is more than simply ‘good’. Of particular note, the use of Super 8 photography throughout the piece is very smart – more than a trendy mixing of formats, it meaningfully helps induce the audience into the historicity of the Mahama’s artistic frame.
Still, in retrospect, my main attraction to Dear Home of Scars is, unsurprisingly, Mahama. Even though the imagery of abandoned railcars and colonial infrastructure of his installation is undeniably imposing, it is he who provides the film’s emotional power, via the unusual combination of authority and openness he projects on camera.
I suppose it’s likely a requirement nowadays that a globally famous artist be charismatic and a skilled communicator, but this describes Mahama. He cuts a commanding figure – a celebrated artist, a builder of institutions, someone capable of mobilizing labor, ideas, and civic imagination on a massive scale. The film repeatedly frames him as an organizer and catalyst, not merely an individual creator, and he speaks with the cadence of someone constantly translating between scales – between history and personal memory, between abstract political ideas and tactile material reality. The film gains force because Mahama is such an adept guide through these ideas. He doesn’t merely explain the project to the audience; he inducts us into his way of seeing.
“A sensory and poetic portrait of Ibrahim Mahama’s world at Red Clay, where history, labour, and transformation coexist in a continuous dialogue rather than a linear story” – Director Marina Meijer
But if the film were only about his eloquence or leadership, it would risk becoming hagiography, and this is a credit to Meijer, for her instincts, and to Mahama for his acquiescence to this level of access. What elevates Dear Home of Scars is the vulnerability that leaks through the margins. There’s a subtle but persistent sense that Mahama feels the burden of becoming a symbolic figure for both the Ghanaian art scene and the communities surrounding these projects. The film observes him not just as an artist with vision, but as someone trying to live up to the moral implications of his own success, producing a film that fascinatingly recognizes that charisma can emerge from vulnerability as much as authority.
Dear Home of Scars premiered in New York in 2024, linked to an exhibition of Mahama’s art by his gallery representative, White Cube, before visiting film festivals like the Athens International Film and Video Festival and winning a prize at the International Festival of Films on Art. It has been online via the Ammodo Docs YouTube channel, where it has performed well for a year and a half, before being brought to our attention. We are now pleased to recommend it to you as an official part of our online collection.