Focus on Ibrahim Ballo

In a world driven by speed and technology, Ibrahim Ballo brings us back to what is essential: memory, material, and gesture.

Through cotton – the thread that connects his Malian childhood to his contemporary artistic practice – Ballo weaves together past and present, tradition and identity, shaping a language made of silence, trace, and light.

His art seeks to repair, to remember, and to restore a human sense of time and matter.

On the occasion of his participation in ArtVerona 2025, we met the artist to explore his practice and the symbolic strength that runs through his work.

TRIUM Cotton lies at the heart of your practice. Why?

IBRAHIM BALLO Cotton is at the core of my work because it is deeply tied to my origins, to my family and cultural history.
It is a living material – soft, fragile, and yet resistant – much like the memories it carries.
As a Malian artist, cotton represents the link with the land, with ancestral gestures of spinning, weaving, and embroidery, often passed down by women.
A vivid memory from my childhood is seeing the women in my village spin cotton by hand, together, in the courtyard. There was a kind of silent dance in their movements, an invisible transmission.
That image has remained with me like an imprint.
Today, working with cotton is my way of paying homage to that collective memory, of valuing a knowledge that is disappearing, and turning it into a language of resistance, poetry, and identity.

TRIUM The red dot often appears on the faces of your figures. What does it represent?

IBRAHIM BALLO The red dot is a symbolic sign. It is a mark of identity, a seal of memory, a reminder of heritage.
It is both a visible wound and an inner light. For me, it represents what we carry in silence: our origins, our family histories, our unspoken stories, the invisible scars of life.
In my artistic language, the red dot becomes a code that connects my characters beyond time and place.
It embodies a calm strength, an inner awareness.
It is also a sign of hope, in a world driven by technology and the pursuit of luxury, where people are pushed toward excess, competition, and frustration.
At the same time, it speaks of sadness in the face of violence and suffering in the world — the terrorism that affects my country and beyond.
That red dot, I would say, launched my art. It struck viewers with its power and the message it carries.

TRIUM Your works often include masks, symbols, and writings, and some of your recent pieces are raw, unpainted canvases. What do they represent?

IBRAHIM BALLO The masks, symbols, and writings are layers of memory.
The masks, inspired by Malian traditions, represent identity in transformation – what is hidden, revealed, and transmitted.
The signs and writings are like sensitive archives: they recall ancient knowledge, lost languages, memories that are passed down not through words, but through gesture.
My recent raw canvases – without paint but marked by embroidery and pastel – signal a change in my practice.
I am getting closer to the essential, to the bare material.
The canvas becomes skin, the embroidery becomes scar, the pastel becomes trace.
It is not an abandonment of painting, but another way of letting the material speak.

TRIUM When you paint and weave, what are you trying to express?

IBRAHIM BALLO When I paint and weave, I try to express what silence holds – buried emotions, invisible legacies, memories that cannot always be spoken.
Through threads, textures, and colors, I talk about the connections – broken or tied – between generations, cultures, the past and the present.
The act of weaving is slow, repetitive, meditative.
It allows me to repair, to question, to transmit – without necessarily explaining.
Painting, on the other hand, introduces rhythm, tension, breath.
Together, they form a sensitive language – a silent cry or a visual prayer – for what words cannot convey.

TRIUM Beauty and pain coexist in your work. How do they relate?

IBRAHIM BALLO I believe that beauty does not erase pain – it transforms it.
In my works, I often deal with themes of suffering, oppression, and wounded memory, but I choose to express them through refined aesthetics, vibrant colors, and carefully worked textures.
Not to soften the subject, but to make it visible, accessible, human.
The thread, the cotton, the embroidery are gestures of repair.
Through them, I try to stitch together fragments of history, to heal wounds, to restore dignity to the memories I represent.
It is in this tension between pain and beauty that balance is born – a space for contemplation, reflection, and hope.

TRIUM Are there moments that have shaped your artistic vision?

IBRAHIM BALLO Many moments have shaped my vision, but the most important one goes back to my childhood in the village, surrounded by artisanal gestures.
Watching my mother and aunts spin cotton, listening to elders tell stories around the fire, seeing fabrics hang like silent narratives – all of that deeply nourished me.
One particular moment was the discovery of an old wrap woven by my grandmother.
It was worn by time, yet every thread still felt alive.
That’s when I understood that art can preserve memory, even when voices fade.
Since then, my work has sought to capture that endangered memory and create a dialogue between past and present through materials that speak for themselves.

TRIUM What would you like international audiences to feel when they see your work?

IBRAHIM BALLO I would like people to feel that my works are bridges – between cultures, between the visible and the invisible, between collective history and individual emotion.
Through thread, embroidery, texture, and color, I want to share a part of Africa made of dignity, resilience, beauty, and transmission.
I am not trying to represent, but to make people feel.
If someone, even far from my context, feels touched or moved when looking at a piece, then the connection has been made.
For me, art serves to repair, to reunite, and to give voice to what is often forgotten.

TRIUM If your art were a place, what would it look like?

IBRAHIM BALLO It would be a space that is both silent and alive – suspended between memory and sensation.
The walls would be made of embroidered fabrics, recycled materials, and stretched threads like lines of life.
There would be textures to touch, colors to feel, forms both familiar and abstract, like blurred yet intimate memories.
Entering that space, one would feel both softness and tension – an emotion that cannot be immediately explained.
It would be a living sanctuary, a workshop of shared memory, a place where every detail whispers something of a common past, of an inheritance to reinvent, of an identity in motion.