BREATHING ROOM
How Are We Here and Elsewhere?
2026 — ongoing, Mixed media installation, tempered glass, UV print on beeswax, beeswax on fine concrete, reinforcing steel, surface transducer, e-ink display, headphones, sound, variable dimensions
Text: Vanessa Amoah Opoku & June Drevet
Conversations: Senami & Vincent
Printing: Eric Frank – GLASTRIX
Metal work: Aaron Rothenbach
Exhibition views: Edward Greiner, Galerie Oel-Früh
The exhibition was co-funded by the Claussen-Simon Foundation and the Triennial of Photography Hamburg.
Breathing Room — How Are We Here And Elsewhere? presents as a large-scale installation that treats the diasporic experience not as a marginal phenomenon, but as the foundation for new ways of relating.
The starting point is a series of conversations Amoah Opoku holds with people about belonging and sense of place. Before and after these encounters, she scans the participants using LiDAR—a surveying technique that emits infrared light and generates three-dimensional point clouds where the light has touched the body. Over the course of several minutes, the artist moves around her conversation partners. If they move along with her, blurriness emerges in the scan, thereby giving them agency over how they wish to be portrayed.
The soft, fragmentary point clouds are materialized in wax, so that the portraits acquire a physical presence. Amoah Opoku thus proposes a different logic for depicting racialized bodies in exhibition space: touch instead of the gaze, and fragment instead of coherence.
The wall portrait is not a finished work. It grows with every new conversation. Breathing Room sees itself as a collective, evolving archive
of diasporic experiences: a family portrait that is far from complete.
The exhibition space invites visitors to linger: organically shaped floor sculptures serve as places to sit and lie down. Transducers mix the recorded conversations into a single frequency, felt through the body of whoever lies there. Small-format e-ink displays make the portraits' creative process visible, the conversations themselves audible through headphones.
Together, these elements form a sensory archive in the making. The installation conceives of diaspora as what it can also be: a state
from which technologies of connection and practices for new ways of relating emerge.