13.06 — Oct Plant Stories, ZK/U Berlin
26.06. Finding Foundations, AdBK Nürnberg
20.08. — 19.09. MARS, Frankfurt a. M.
17.09. — 11.10. Besessene Berge, Forum Stadtpark, Graz
27.09. Werkstattgespräch, Sophiensæle Berlin
11.10. — 03.05.26 18. International Triennial of Textile Łódź
My artistic practice spans immersive installations, prints, sculptures, and performative works engaged in relational world-making. I construct new epistemological frameworks for understanding diaspora, technology, and belonging. My approach is fundamentally systematic, where every element serves a precise conceptual purpose. I use 3D scanning tools such as LiDAR and photogrammetry literally as tactile embodied technology, as extensions of my diasporic self. The resulting data is shaped by my movements and choices, transforming imperial tools into memoryscapes — fragmented, speculative environments where past, present, and future coexist.
The works provide an aesthetic and poetic space for multiplicity in a world obsessed with resolution. I aim to transform how we relate to technology, history and each other.
The works provide an aesthetic and poetic space for multiplicity in a world obsessed with resolution. I aim to transform how we relate to technology, history and each other.
BRICKS AND CEMENT DON’T MAKE A HOUSE
2024, Multimedia installation, video loop, sound, textile, steel, 22:59 min, Variable dimensions
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 worried voice message on tape cassette: the money meant to support the family in Ghana hadn't arrived. For him, it was clear: everyone who emigrates builds a house at home. A house for the family, and a house to return to.
This installation explores how bridges to home are maintained across diaspora, and how to build belonging when land itself has been expropriated by neo-colonial structures. Using smartphone LiDAR scanning, a tool historically used for territorial mapping and resource extraction, fragments of unfinished houses are captured across Ghana. These point clouds become self-portraits: tangible representations of space mapped through touch rather than extractive seeing.
Joy Weinberger transforms these digital fragments into woven textiles, where pixels become materialized through warp and weft. Family archive photographs move from analog to digital to textile, creating mediators between virtual and physical worlds. A second textile work assembles scanned fragments from multiple unfinished houses into one communal home. Each fragment standing for a similar story of interrupted construction and deferred dreams.
Twenty steel reinforcement bars arrange according to the grandfather's house floor plan. This steel, left protruding from concrete structures across Ghana as preparation for future building phases when resources allow, embodies both modernization and financial limitation. The installation's center features textile work based on point cloud scans of village ground, positioned where the courtyard of a traditional Ashanti house would be. A space for gathering and nourishment.
This collaboration resists categorizations that restrict both technology and textile work, questioning their gender-specific and geographical connotations. By bringing digital worlds back into physical, tactile space, it is explored how cultural knowledge transforms across generations, migration, and diaspora. Not through appropriation, but through lived inheritance and technological resistance.
Pigment print on Canson Rag Photographique,
handmade steel frame (hand engraved)
90 x 60 cm
Edition of 3 + 2 AP
Pigment print on Canson Rag Photographique,
handmade steel frame (hand engraved)
60 x 90 cm
Edition of 3 + 2 AP
Pigment print on Canson Rag Photographique,
handmade steel frame (hand engraved)
60 x 40 cm
Edition of 5 + 2 AP
Pigment print on Canson Rag Photographique,
handmade steel frame (hand engraved)
60 x 40 cm
Edition of 5 + 2 AP
Pigment print on Canson Rag Photographique,
handmade steel frame (hand engraved)
73 x 110 cm
Edition of 3 + 2 AP
Pigment print on Canson Rag Photographique,
handmade steel frame (hand engraved)
90 x 60 cm
Edition of 3 + 2 AP
THRESHOLDS OF ENGINEERED LIFE
2025, Pigment print on paper, hand-engraved steel frames, various dimensions, sound work with visual interface
Funded by Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation
Photo Credits: Robert Schittko
Inside tropical greenhouses, the lush foliage often distracts from the hidden systems that make this artificial survival possible. My focus is the pipes that sneak beneath the soil, the hissing misters and the blinking sensors — technical infrastructures that reveal the control sustaining species far from their original habitats.
Many of these plants were transported during colonial expeditions and are now preserved under glass. The greenhouse becomes a metaphor for ongoing extraction, orchestrating survival and performing nature as spectacle.
To capture these spaces, I use tools that measure by collecting thousands of points across surfaces. Historically, such methods have claimed territory, extracted resources, and enforced dominance. Today, they remain part of surveillance and extractive digital economies.
I use them to expose mechanisms of control through Gaussian splatting, which turns each measured point into a soft, semi-transparent fragment. Each fragment becomes a refusal to participate in extractive seeing, breaking the illusion of objective capture. In the virtual world, preserved plants overgrow their infrastructure and turn the inside outwards.
Framed in hand-engraved steel, these images come to life through poetic fragments describing a sonic transformation. The sound of this reality emerges from field recordings of mechanized greenhouse environments and sonification of the scanned data. As point clouds accumulate and plants virtually overgrow their containment, mechanical orchestrations transform: synthetic frequencies bloom from coordinate data, algorithmic rhythms dissolve into organic textures.
A sound interface employs e-ink technology – a deliberately slow, energy-minimal display that resists the smooth consumption of digital imagery. When sonic elements trigger visual responses, the screen's inherent refresh delays and ghosting artifacts become poetic metaphors for technological irritation. Mechanical infrastructure appears in static portraits before dissolving into fractured traces, creating temporal overlays where past and present contaminate each other.The technology's 'failure' to deliver smooth experience parallels the greenhouse's fundamental deception: both promise perfect replication while revealing the seams of their constructed realities.
Fine Art Print on Hahnemühle Museum Etching
80 x 60 cm
Edition of 5 + 2 AP
Credits: FangSheng Chou
Fine Art Print on Hahnemühle Museum Etching
80 x 60 cm
Edition of 5 + 2 AP
Credits: FangSheng Chou
LIGHT, TOUCH, ROOT (HYBRID)
2024 — ongoing, Mixed media installation, PLA, wax, photograms on paper, Variable dimensions
Nominated for the S+T+ARTS Prize 2025 of the European Commission and Ars Electronica. It 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
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?
80 x 37 cm
80 x 60 cm
80 x 60 cm
80 x 60 cm
80 x 35 cm
SUNRISE
TO
SUNRISE
(TRICKSTERS)
2023 – ongoing, Mixed Media, UV print on Alu-Dibond, engraved acrylic glass, magnets, silicone, organic and inorganic material from Ghana and 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.
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.
170 x 128 cm
Edition of 1 + 1 AP
Exhibition view, Weserhalle
170 x 128 cm
Edition of 3 + 1 AP
ROOTED RESURGENCE
2023, Mixed media, UV prints on acrylic glass, 170 x 128 cm
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.
HALTUNG
2021, 4k video loop, 9:16
Video Link: https://youtu.be/FCDbImYivCM?si=-wxASSUZKSDsJ-vj
In white cube spaces, the presence of a Black body, even a digital one, shifts how work is read, interpreted, and valued. "Haltung" confronts this reality through a digitally rendered avatar created with Epic Games' MetaHuman Creator during its beta phase, when the platform promised "revolutionary" diversity for hyperreal human avatars.
Despite marketing claims of inclusivity, the software revealed itself as a Baukastenprinzip—a modular system built from racialized archetypes that betrayed its origins in predominantly white, male design teams. The "diversity" was cosmetic, offering preset variations rather than genuine representation. My avatar emerges from this constrained system, animated with subtle facial movements I captured through face-tracking: a blink, slight parting of lips, micro-expressions that suggest life within technological limitation.
The avatar maintains watch over the exhibition space, embodying my presence while highlighting both my physical absence and the inadequacy of digital representation tools. This creates layered tensions—viewers encounter my work knowing a Black artist made it, but through technology that struggles to authentically render Black identity beyond superficial parameters.
The work interrogates how both technological and institutional spaces shape artistic reception. When my practice involves transforming imperial technologies, does knowing these innovations come from a Black artist, represented through flawed software, alter their perceived legitimacy?
The avatar's steady gaze reverses traditional gallery dynamics, creating accountability within viewing experiences. "Haltung", posture, attitude, moral stance, becomes both literal and conceptual: holding position in space while embodying critical stance toward systems that consistently undervalue Black intellectual contributions, even when claiming inclusivity.
Through this technological intervention, the piece exposes how "diversity" in digital tools often remains surface-level, while maximizing conceptual impact about presence, absence, and authentic representation.
NICHTS
ALS
SOLIDE
2021, 4k video installation, 21:9, sound, 16:25 min, projection surface (120 × 280 cm), fonstruction 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.