12.04. Art Düsseldorf
08.05. HfG Offenbach
20.06. — 07.09. Haus Coburg, Delmenhorst
BRICKS AND CEMENT DON’T MAKE A HOUSE
2024, Multimedia Installation, Textile, Steel, Video Loop: 22:59 min, Sound
Vanessa Amoah Opoku & Joy Weinberger
Teaser: https://vimeo.com/1013888424
Voices: Vanessa Amoah Opoku,
Tape cassette recording by Kwabena Krah
Exhibition views: Roxana Rios
In the mid-1990s, Vanessa Amoah Opoku's grandfather sent his son a voice message on a tape cassette. He was very worried: his son had already emigrated to Europe a few years ago and the money he wanted to use to support the family at home had not yet arrived.
For Kwabena Krah, it was clear that his son would build a house in Ghana. Because that is something that everyone who emigrates does. A house at home. A house for the family. And a house to return to. Many migrant family stories are about rifts that people have to overcome in poverty, migration, class advancement, the racism of the Global North and neo-colonial structures. And overcoming them is not the end, but usually just the beginning of new barriers. How can bridges to home be maintained and rebuilt? How can one's own life be made understandable - both for the German family and for the family in Ghana? And how to build a home when the land has been expropriated by neo-colonial, capitalist and extractivist actors for the purpose of extracting natural resources?
Vanessa Amoah Opoku and Joy Weinberger's practice combines different disciplines and techniques to explore complex issues together. Vanessa Amoah Opoku uses 3D point cloud scans to explore the fragility and incompleteness of experiences in the diaspora. Joy Weinberger focuses on textile fabric structures and combines analog weaving processes with digital techniques.
Opoku's 3D scans, created with her smartphone, are central to her work. She moves through space, capturing her surroundings with Lidar Scanning, which is used in mapping landscapes and constructions sites. An infrared sensor strokes surfaces and reflects their light back into a camera lens, transforming the physical world into digital fragments. The scanned environment becomes a self-portrait, consisting not of a copy or dipiction, but a tangible representation of the physical space, that was mapped through touch.
Woven fabrics are grid-like structures that can produce technical and discrete images simultaneously and follow a binary order. The structure can be compared to technical images such as pixel/video images, in which a homogeneous surface is divided into small pixels that are present in a regular grid structure. In the case of textiles, the structure is determined by the warp and weft, so the information is transferred into an image-textile structure.
In the production of textiles, the grid is not imposed on an existing space or material surface, but the textile is the element that creates the surface itself: a matrix in which signs, patterns and figures can emerge. In this work, the two artists undertake an investigation based on the family history of one of them. They not only trace the stones, the earth, the clay and the unfinished houses, but also the perspective of a second-generation migrant in the diaspora, who tells of ways of communication and failure, of expropriation of land and the pain that no one talks about. They also talk about the hope of progress and a better life. And about the intergenerational return and ultimately about building a home.
Two textile works are shown at different positions between two steles. The first work shows photos from the Opoku family archive, which depict the three time levels in which the entire work takes place and at the same time mark different points in time of the return: The grandfather's time, the son's first return after migration, and finally the granddaughter's first visit to the grandfather's village. The textiles function here as mediators between the digital and physical levels. An analog photograph serves as the basis. This is transformed into a digital pixel image through the scanning process. This data, in turn, forms the basis for a web file that enables the return to an analog medium. The technology must adapt to the conditions of the loom: By reducing to eight color generators, the file is rendered in pixels consisting of the primary colors black, white, cyan, magenta, yellow, red, blue and green. Crossing points in the mesh correspond to the pixels in the image - materialized pixels are created. On the reverse side, the image dissolves into itself, losing its pictorial quality and bringing the material and color composition of the textile to the fore with its sculptural-looking surface.
The second textile work is based on point cloud scans that were taken at various locations in Ghana and reassembled. The result is a house made up of fragments of several unfinished houses. Each fragment can therefore stand for a similar story. Together they form a new, communal home. Textiles are often bound to the dimension of the surface. In order to conceive a textile construct from the virtual space into the physical, tactile space, a multi-layered textile is woven and then embroidered separately with the data from the point cloud scans. Transparencies and overlays are used to create a new image. At the same time, the textile picks up on the fragmentary composition of the scans and thus refers to the multidimensional arrangement of the points in virtual space.
The installation consists of 20 steles made of reinforcing steel, which is used in the construction of buildings. The arrangement of the steles is based on the floor plan of the grandfather's house. The reinforcing steel refers to modern house construction with cement and concrete: it stands for modernization and progress and is diametrically opposed to traditional house construction with clay and natural stone. Many homeowners leave reinforcing steel protruding so that they can later extend the building. As financial resources are often limited, construction is carried out in stages, with the iron serving as preparation for future construction phases.
In the center of the installation is another textile work, based on pointcloud scans of the ground from the grandfather's village. It is no coincidence that the position of the textile crosses the courtyard of a traditional Ashanti house. This is traditionally used for social gatherings, cooking and eating. Visitors are invited to sit down and linger there.
One focus of the installation is the connection between technology and the tactile level of textiles. Through the process of bringing the digital world back into physical space and vice versa, themes such as technological progress - both at the time of the first industrial revolution in relation to the weaving machine and the fourth industrial revolution in relation to digitality and the information age - gender roles and technology as well as immersion and physical touch and its absence are explored. This provides an opportunity to engage with the complex relationships between gender, art and labor. They show how these seemingly disparate fields interact and communicate with each other within the artistic sphere. In doing so, the artists benefit not only from their different artistic practices, but also from their personal experiences and identities.
The artists also see this process as a form of resistance to the categorizations that often restrict technology and textile work. The textile creates a physical medium that not only opens up new dimensions in its plasticity, but also adds a tactile level. Textiles can be felt, folded, pulled and arranged: Flexible structures intervene in a digital, pictorial representation, dissolve it and bring it back together again. The technique of point cloud scanning, which stores a fragmentary recording of reality, is brought back to a new, physically tangible level. Scanning touches the environment, documents and archives the moment. The textile brings this snapshot back into the space, allows it to be felt and thus creates a connection to the space and the visitors.
By bringing these disciplines together, the artists aim to blur the boundaries between them and thereby question their gender-specific and geographical connotations. This process is not only a technical exploration, but also a socio-political statement that aims to redefine the value and perception of these disciplines in art and society.
LIGHT, TOUCH, ROOT (HYBRID)
2024 — ongoing, Mixed Media Installation
The work was created during a residency organized by Künstlerische Tatsachen, as a guest researcher at the University of Ulm in the special research area CataLight, which involves three German universities and one Austrian university working on replicating photosynthesis to produce sugar instead of hydrogen as an energy carrier.
Text: Vanessa Amoah Opoku & Marie Niederleithinger
Exhibition views: FangSheng Chou
Using near-infrared LiDAR scanning, the artist captures so-called invasive plant species and transforms them into point clouds in a completely new space. The low-frequency 800 nm-light of the 3D scanner not only interacts with the position of the plants in space and their surface structure. The plants may also sense the infrared light and it might stimulate their growth.
Vanessa Amoah Opoku, uses these plants, often labeled as »invasive« or »pest-like« as an opportunity to reflect on the seemingly unchangeable notions of home, (national) borders, and the resilience of nature. She focuses on their remarkable adaptability to human-made environments.
In a virtual, science fiction-inspired space with two suns, she transforms the plants into new species. In this new environment, they embody an evolution based on resilience. Their forms, colors, and characteristics are preserved, but reinterpreted.
Different parts of the point cloud scans reflect or absorb simulated infrared light. In this process, the water stored in the leaves becomes visible through brightly illuminated reflections. 3D-printed reliefs emerge from the image into physical space. Visitors are invited to touch them and experience the virtual space in a tactile way. Ghostly representations of the original plants hover above the image.
Vanessa Amoah Opoku created these photograms using light-sensitive photoemulsion and exposure to UV light. The seasonal light spectrum and constitution of the plants shape the image.
Worlds with two suns, like those that exist outside our solar system, have different physical conditions. If the plants there too were to feed on a kind of photosynthesis, what kind of energy conversion and artificial photosynthesis would it be?
The artist practices an interaction with nature based on different types of light that goes beyond the distorted practice of »mere representation«. The exposure of plants to infrared light during the digitization process, as well as to UV light during the exposure of the photograms, leaves traces in virtual and physical space. These traces dissolve the boundaries between the artificial and the living, showing the human relationship to nature in a hybrid light.
The plant species were collected at the Botanical Garden of Ulm University.
Five main research questions:
- How does infrared light interact with plant biology during scanning, and what potential effects does this have on plant growth and behavior?
- How does reframing our view of these plants challenge the traditional divide between "native" and "foreign" species, and what does this reveal about our concepts of national borders and identity?
- How do different light types (IR, UV) create unique ways of documenting and interacting with nature, and what does this tell us about the relationship between artificial and living systems?
- How does blurring the line between "artificial" and "living" mirror the constructed nature of our categories like "native" and "invasive"?
- How do tactile interactions with 3D-printed reliefs connect our virtual and physical experiences of nature, and what does this mean for our relationship with digital natural forms?
SUNRISE
TO
SUNRISE
(TRICKSTERS) 1–7
2023 – ongoing, Mixed Media, UV Prints on Aludibond, Size Variable, Engraved Acrylic Glass, Magnets, Silicone, Engraved Aluminium Plates, Organic Material from Ghana & Austria
Excerpt from press release by Naomi Rado for EIGEN+ART Lab.
Exhibition views: Peter Oliver Wolff
Sunrise to Sunrise (Tricksters) explores the dying of old worlds and practicing resistance through the creation of new memory– and dreamscapes. The work unfolds its meaning by literally placing several layers of material on top of each other. Structurally distinct, these layers interconnect.
The rearmost layer of each of the three works consists of a print on an aluminum plate that shows organic material captured through 3D-scans.
The point clouds in Sunrise to Sunrise (Tricksters) originate from cacao plantations in Ghana and the Carinthian Karawanks. Whereas renderings of fields and trees from plantation sites reference the colonialism, deforestation and climate crisis tied to Ghanaian agriculture, the latter, marking the border between Austria and Slovenia, is a historic site of Partisan action in World War II. Opoku seeks to build landscapes that embody resistance or elements from her memory and dreams: re-ownership and self-empowerment of the oppressed are set into a dialogue with antifascist movements of the past. With delicate materiality and the particularizing effect of the 3D-scans, Opoku’s landscapes seem so fragile, that they threaten to disintegrate at any moment.
Utilizing an app for LiDAR 3D-scanning, originally developed for constructional engineering, Opoku’s point clouds never fully materialize. As the app’s algorithm cannot mesh them into 3D- models, the point clouds remain in a state of constant pending. Hence the works themselves foreshadow the hypothetical nature of their shown sceneries. These imaginary worlds are upheld only by the layers that superimpose them.
A filigree silicone layer serves as a frame, although it can hardly be understood as such. Stretched over the surface and around the images‘ edges this layer almost resembles a symbiotic organism. Small particles embedded in the silicone layer originate from sites scanned by Opoku – these are the only actual organic and inorganic materials present in her work.
The silicone mold’s pattern, generated and cast with the help of AI tools, derives from Adinkra symbols. In Ghanaian and Akan culture, Adinkra symbols hold historical and philosophical meaning, conveying aphorisms and allegorical concepts. While these visual symbols are traditionally used on pottery and textiles, Opoku trained an AI with a data set to build her own Adinkra. In yet another piece of the series Sunrise to Sunrise (Tricksters), Opoku imparts a linguistic expression to the Adinkra symbols: Engravings, written also on aluminum plates, feature proverbs from the same data used for creating the silicone layer. Opoku leaves it to the audience to envision the landscape counterparts to these tenets. Utilizing AI to create new images and meaning, the artist references how cultural symbolisms, like the Adinkra and Tricksters, undergo transformations influenced by various factors, especially within the context of temporization. By incorporating aspects of generational knowledge, the dynamics of migration processes, and the enduring effects of the diasporic experience, Opoku’s works transcend the mere act of appropriating mysticism, history, and culture. Instead, they explore the intricate alterations and enhancement of culturally significant concepts, deeply interwoven with the essence of temporal progression.
Acrylic glass plates attached with magnets try to preserve the sceneries by partially sealing them off. Figurative engravings placed on the glass complement the landscapes and particles. Among other figures from Akan mythology, Anansi, portrayed as a spider, is one of the tricksters reinterpreted by Opoku for her series. Like a protagonist, the spider enlivens the digitally created forest, becoming the depiction of an ancestor, a guiding spirit representing agency. The tricksters in mythology inhabit a realm of ambivalence.
ORANGERY
OF
CARE
2024, Site-specific Installation, Curation, Website, at nGbK Berlin
as part of Berlin Art Week
House plants are entangled in the colonial history of botanical gardens and the destruction of habitats, but also in privatized practices of life preservation. On the one hand, they act as status symbols and fetish, on the other as cues to reflect on regenerative and caring activities aimed at preserving ecosystems.
Based on a site-specific concept for looking after and propagating discarded pot plants, the collective PARA has invited contemporary artists whose work deals with the modes of relationships between humans and plants. How does the health of plants reflect human behavior? How are encounters with plants influenced by (post-)colonial conditions? Does rethinking human-plant relationships also lead to a relearning of relations among humans? The exhibition and program of events addresses conditions of life, limits on resources of care, and constructions of nature and femininity. Video- and spatial installations, sculptures, paintings, and textile works reveal the tensions between protection and control inherent in the practice of keeping and caring for plants, as well as exploring its transformative potential.
Exhibition with works by Rob Crosse, Marlene Heidinger, Bethan Hughes, Dunja Krcek, Samir Laghouati-Rashwan, Julia Löffler, Anne Marie Maes & Margarita Maximova, Jesse McLean, PARA (Peter Behrbohm, Lina Brion, Vanessa Amoah Opoku, Jonas Fischer, Amelie Neumann, Kolja Vennewald, Joy Weinberger), Laure Prouvost, Lex Rütten & Jana Kerima Stolzer, Shirin Sabahi, Hoda Tawakol, Sophie Utikal
Program of events and outreach with Anguezomo Nzé Mboulou Mba Bikoro and Nane Kahle, Fanny Brandauer, Rob Crosse, Josephine Hans, Bethan Hughes, Gilly Karjevsky, Dunja Krcek, Jessica J. Lee, Anne Marie Maes and Margarita Maximova, Marylou, Juliana Oliveira, Mélia Roger, Shirin Sabahi, Miki
nGbK work group: Lina Brion, Vanessa Amoah Opoku, Jonas Fischer, Amelie Neumann, Kolja Vennewald
REST IN PEACE SIMULATION
中文和德文见下文
2022/2023, 360° Video, 3D Animation, Installation
In collaboration with Philisha Kay, for the solo show “REST IN PEACE Simulation” at Nanfei Bar, Guangzhou, as part of “Escaping Involution”, hosted by HB Station in Guangzhou (CHN) and Synnika, Frankfurt/Main (DE).
Review by Naomi Rado in ARTS OF THE WORKING CLASS: https://artsoftheworkingclass.org/text/meditations-against-linearity
Video Link: https://youtu.be/YeK-TEjEkpw?si=IzOEtVfjHelUpGkr
Exhibition view: Peter Oliver Wolff & Performance documentation: civa media arts festival
The ever-evolving complexities and demands of contemporary capitalism have left many navigating a state of limbo, constantly edging a breakdown in a perpetual compulsion to increase, improve and intensify in order to remain afloat.
Within this framework, Vanessa A. Opoku and Philisha Kay are exploring the potentials of escapism into virtual realities.
REST IN PEACE invites the audience to enter states of relaxation through detachment from their physical bodies in several mediated simulations, co-created with the interpretation of artificial intelligence and experienceable in virtual 360° environments.
Within them, the audience is asked to engage in different activities that explore the nagging feelings of anxiety that states of inactivity can produce in our hyperproductive environments and to critically reflect on the individual situatedness of (their own) resting bodies and the privileges implicated in withdrawing from (over)work.
REST IN PEACE points to the entanglements of time and notions of resourcefulness and explores the increasing difficulty of shutting down, even if only for a moment.
ESCAPING INVOLUTION is a collaboration between Times Museum's Huangbian Station Contemporary Art Research Center (HBS) in Guangzhou and Synnika in Frankfurt/Main, supported by the Visual Art Project Fund of the Goethe-Institute, the Hessisches Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Kunst and the Kulturamt Frankfurt/Main.
ROOTED RESURGENCE
2023, Mixed Media, UV Prints on Acrylic Glass, 128x170cm
Special Mention in Re:Touch. Expanded Surfaces in Smartphone Photography, metaLAB Harvard & FU Berlin.
Text: Lina Brion
Exhibition views: Peter Oliver Wolff for EIGEN + ART Lab & Dotgain for WESERHALLE
Ever since the first orangeries and botanical gardens came into fashion in the Baroque era, plants have been brought to Europe en masse and systematically from tropical regions. Greenhouses and terrariums were developed specifically for their displacement and preservation in the European climate. These interventions have changed the respective ecosystems irreversibly.
To this day, colonial botany is as determinative of the globalized plantation economy as it is of the exoticization and fetishization of plants, whether in the palm house or the living room.
Rooted Resurgence emerged from a critical engagement with the collection of the Palermo Botanical Gardens. Palermo was one of the largest ports for the transatlantic enslavement trade in early modern Europe.
Today, taking biological material from the once displaced plant collections is prohibited. Vanessa A. Opoku responds by taking pointcloud scans of various plants via smartphone and transforming them into 3D objects. In virtual space, she creates new connections and combinations, adding a story of transformation to the plants and their history of violence.
NICHTS
ALS
SOLIDE
2021, 4k Video Projection, 21:9, Sound, 16:25 min, Projection Surface (280 × 120 cm), Construction Pillars
Winner of gute aussichten, new german photography award 2021/2022.
Video Link: https://youtu.be/Vx5f4ind-5k?si=aMGCmyu6D_6QKq1k
Text: Naomi Rado
Exhibition views: Hyejeong Yoo
Text based on poems by May Ayim and Mascha Kaléko
Voice: Tale Al-Deen
Music: Adrian Diraque, Markus Dröse
Mastering: Philipp Waltinger, Markus Dröse
The spatial installation "Nichts als Solide" consisting of two videoworks "Nichts als Solide" and "Haltung", can be understood as an examination of those traces that people leave behind in their surroundings and that burn themselves into landscapes and places. In conversation with poem by the Jewish lyricist Mascha Kaléko and the Afro-German poet May Ayim, which provide a data set for an Artificial Intelligence, a monologue is created in which a new, fictitious lyrical persona is formed.
Through the medium of this virtual being, the artist not only poses questions of identity, but answers them with self-empowerment, placing the statements generated by the AI and her own words in a context from which a decided stance emerges. The sound is based on field recordings with contact microphones from urban space, that the two electronic musicians Adrian Diraque and Markus Dröse transformed into ambient tracks.
The visuals are based on Point Cloud Scans from night walks through the city of Berlin. What Mascha Kaléko, May Ayim and the artist connects, apart from sharing marginalizing experiences, is, the ambivalence between the urban space as a space of danger, and as a space of freedom and empowerment.
HALTUNG
2021, 4k Video, Loop, 9:16
Video Link: https://youtu.be/FCDbImYivCM?si=-wxASSUZKSDsJ-vj
The work “Haltung” shows a digitally rendered avatar that resembles the artist and seems to move slightly. The avatar has been animated through small facial movements such as a blink or the slight opening of the mouth.
These movements are based on the artists own facial expressions that she captured using face-tracking software. The avatar keeps a watch over the space in which it is installed. It serves as a digital representation of the artist not being physically present. It faces the observer as the observer faces the avatar.
VIVE I
2021, Digital Painting, Print on Textile, Wood, Performance
VIVE I was part of the performance “Archivio Performante” by Bara/D’Urbano in Summer 2021.
We all have multiple digital versions of ourselves, ranging from simple usernames to detailed profiles with information about our interests and preferences. These digital selves exist in parallel to our physical selves and can alter how others perceive us.
They can communicate with others without our knowledge or consent.
Our digital selves may represent and protect us, but they can also fail us in the borderlands between the digital and physical realms.