JOHANNESBURG.- Goodman Gallery Johannesburg will present ‘Carriers’, a group exhibition that brings together the work of Maxwell Alexandre, Pélagie Gbaguidi, and Ibrahim Mahama.
This exhibition marks the first time Alexandre and Mahama have exhibited at the gallery. These three artists’ practices bear witness to histories that have been inscribed on bodies, materials, and territories. Across painting, installation, photography, and assemblage, each artist engages the act of “carrying”; as a burden, a legacy, a gesture of continuity, and a strategy of resistance. Opening during FNB Art Joburg, a pivotal moment in Johannesburg’s cultural calendar.
Together, these artists engage the concept of carrying: transporting the past into the present, bearing witness to and transforming what has been inherited into something emancipatory. ‘Carriers’ are an active conduit; where stories move, where burdens shift, and where new forms of solidarity are made possible.
Maxwell Alexandre (b. 1990) grew up in Rocinha, one of the largest favelas in Rio de Janeiro. Through his large-scale compositions on pardo paper and canvas Maxwell Alexandre carries the visual and spiritual weight of contemporary Black experience in Brazil, drawing from the iconography of the favela and institutional critique. A former skater, Alexandre’s practice attempts to capture the dizzying flow of images and transfer it into artworks. The works operate as sites where everyday rituals meet sacred memory, and where the figure, often anonymous and in motion, becomes a vessel for presence and power. Alexandre’s figures move through systems that seek to erase them, insisting instead on being seen, worshipped, and remembered.
In this exhibition we present a number of works by Pélagie Gbaguidi, which carry ancestral and transgenerational memory through a phenomenological and embodied practice. Using natural pigments, discarded materials, and her own body as a mark-making tool, she inscribes layers of trauma, resilience, and myth onto surfaces. In works such as ‘Disconnection’ or ‘A qui ai-je vendu mon scalpe’, the canvas becomes a living skin, scratched, bruised, and storied. Gbaguidi positions herself as a contemporary griot, a carrier of oral and visual histories that speak to the dislocations of colonialism and the urgent need for repair.
Ibrahim Mahama transforms industrial and archival detritus into monumental works that carry the weight of global trade, forced migration, and collective labor. His stitched-together jute sacks, railway fragments, and photographic documents chart the movement of bodies and materials across exploited economies. In recent works, Mahama draws topographical lines over obscured bodies, creating hybrid landscapes that carry both geographic and corporeal histories—tracing how the past imprints itself on the skin, and how identity is borne, marked, and made visible.
Maxwell Alexandre graduated from PUC-RJ (Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro) in 2016. He held his artistic baptism in 2018 with his first exhibition combining painting and performance, with rapper BK playing the ceremonial priest. The artist also co-founded a “Church of the Kingdom of Art” (also called “A Noiva”, “The Wife”), supporting alternative Brazilian creation. His work has been included in the collections of the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, the MASP (Museum of Arts of São Paulo) and the MAR (Museum of Arts of Rio). Maxwell Alexandre was in residence at the Delfina Foundation (London, 2018) and at mac Lyon (Lyon, 2019). He collaborates with the A gentil Carioca gallery (Rio) and presented a solo exhibition at David Zwirner (London) in December 2020.
Pélagie Gbaguidi (from Benin born in Dakar in 1965), lives and works in Brussels. Gbaguidi calls herself a contemporary griot - a West-African storyteller, redefining the dimension of orality in traditional heritage through her own approach to plasticity. Gbaguidi often alludes to overlooked stories, ridding them of simplifications and archetypes produced by so-called official historiography. Her oeuvre forms a new timeline of colonial and post-colonial history on which traces of trauma, symbols, associations, and new, composite archetypes counter the official version that skirts that period’s oppression, horror, and legacy. Among Pélagie Gbaguidi’s most recent solo exhibitions are ‘Antre’, La Verrière – Fondation Hermès, Brussels, Belgium (2025) and ‘Murmurations’, Musée d’art contemporain de la Haute-Vienne – Château de Rochechouart, France (2024). The artist has also taken part in relevant group shows at Kunstmuseum Basel, S.M.A.K. in Ghent, Centre Pompidou-Metz, WIELS in Brussels, SESC Pompeia in São Paulo, the Berlin Biennial of 2020, and documenta 14 in Kassel and Athens.
Ibrahim Mahama was born in 1987 in Tamale, Ghana. He lives and works in Accra, Kumasi and Tamale. Mahama came to prominence for politically charged open-air installations using jute sacks, which are stitched together as a tattered patchwork and draped over architectural structures. In the cities of Accra and Kumasi in Ghana, where he lives and works, he has sited work in locations such as a library, a museum, an airport and a bridge. Solo exhibitions include Kunsthalle Osnabrück, Germany (2023); Oude Kerk, Amsterdam (2022); Frac Pays de la Loire (2022); The High Line, New York (2021); University of Michigan Museum of Art (2020); The Whitworth, University of Manchester (2019); Norval Foundation, Cape Town (2019); Tel Aviv Art Museum, Israel (2016); and K.N.U.S.T Museum, Kumasi, Ghana (2013).
