The artist Ibrahim Mahama keeps on the lookout for scrap — major scrap — that bears the marks and summons memories of the labor that built Ghana, his country.

When the discards are smallish — for instance square mesh grids used for smoking fish, or wood boxes in which shoeshine men carry their brushes — Mahama will buy them by the dozens or hundreds and stash them until the right artistic application appears.

When they’re massive — like colonial-era rail carriages or, on one occasion, six derelict Soviet-made passenger airplanes — he has them hauled by flatbed trucks to Tamale, his home city in northern Ghana. They join the collections that he has amassed in three warehouse-scaled complexes that he has converted into studio, exhibition and education spaces.

Mahama, 37, earned notice with large-scale assemblages of jute sacks, stitched together by hand, that once carried cocoa — Ghana’s top export — and then coal or other goods. They accumulated aromas and physical wear. (The artist had observed the simple paradox that trucks carrying jute sacks of goods for export easily travel across borders that many workers cannot.)

With this history-charged fabric he cloaked whole buildings, à la Christo, from the National Theater in Accra, Ghana’s capital, to a pair of 19th-century towers in Kassel, Germany, during Documenta in 2017. Two years earlier, as the youngest artist in the 2015 Venice Biennale, he had used the sacks to drape the long passageway where visitors exit the Arsenale, the dockyards exhibition space.

“With most of the materials I work with, it’s not as if I’m a genius and I just came up with it,” Mahama said. “There are things that you encounter all the time, and one day there’s a moment when you think, if this thing and that thing come together; this new form might be made. The labor of many people has already gone into it. As an artist, you’re just borrowing from that and recontextualizing.”