Although at first sight the Barbican appears ablaze with pink hues, the woven fabric acts as a second skin of the building, sculpting its harsh edges and strict geometrical shapes. It dominates the harsh temperament of raw concrete and replaces it with pink purity.  

Showcasing one of its largest installations yet, the Barbican performance arts centre has been entirely covered in pink fabric titled ‘Purple Hibiscus’. 

Ibrahim Mahama, the artist behind the pink, tells the Guardian ‘It started as a joke’.  “I thought, ‘The British weather is always very grey, why not pick a colour that contrasts with the sky?’” 

Not only does it contrast with the sky but also directly opposes the sordid nature of the Barbican’s architectural style of ‘Brutalism.’ The concrete is raw and exposed while symmetrical shapes make up its minimal structure. Solidifying the core idea of Brutalism- that buildings should not hide what they are made of.

The labour-intensive work that constructed the Barbican was a catalyst in Mahama’s decision to make the fabric piece entirely by hand with a force of 1000 seamstresses and weavers, in his birthplace Tamale, Ghana. 

Spanning 2000 square metres, the scale of the project meant they had to use “Aliu Mahama Sports stadium in Tamale as the primary studio space” Mahama reveals in a statement to the Guardian. 

A hundred batakaris, traditional Ghanaian men’s garments, embellish the fabric but when looking at it from below, they replicate embroidered patches because of their sheer magnitude.

These batakaris were collected from numerous communities, some more reluctant than others according to Mahama, as they preserve history, intergenerational meaning and contain persisting superstitions around generational curses. 

Everything holds value in Mahama’s eyes, he sees stories in the life cycles of objects he keeps, including hundreds of old shoe repair boxes, sewing machines, colonial- era desks and railway seats. “When things are old and scarred, I believe there are ghosts contained within them,” he says. “Those ghosts have the potential to allow us to transcend the boundaries of how we see the world.”

 

One pink canvas tumbles down the walls of the Barbican- an escape from the concrete surroundings, and a crimson beginning to the new season.