Akosua Viktoria Adu-Sanyah: Residual Sky Under Contamination

Large-format, hand-developed color prints are characteristic of the artistic work of Akosua Viktoria Adu-Sanyah (b. 1990). Through manual and chemical processes, the German-Ghanaian artist shifts and expands the boundaries of photography. By transferring the fleeting states of analogue development – otherwise only experienced in the darkroom – into the exhibition space, she makes the unseen, latent, and processual nature of the medium perceptible.

The starting point for her current works are historical photographs from the British Empire & Commonwealth Collection in Bristol, taken at her father's birthplace in present-day Ghana. In search of alternative narratives, she detaches skies, treetops, and landscapes from their colonial context and transfers these extracted fragments of nature onto color negatives. A recurring image in her work is a portrait of her great-grandfather Wilhelm Schlüter in the German Air Force. “For me, this photograph functions less as a historical document than as a kind of ghost. (...) The image represents a structural disturbance in my own existence,” says the artist.

For her, the darkroom serves not only as a site of production, but as a space of reflection in which experiences, relationships, and memories take shape before they become fully visible. RESIDUAL SKY UNDER CONTAMINATION features approximately 20 new large-scale works installed in a tilted position “against” the exhibition space.

Curated by Nadine Isabelle Henrich, curator at the House of Photography. Curatorial assistance: Viktoria Rochambeau, curatorial trainee, House of Photography.

Accompanying the exhibition as part of the 9th Triennial of Photography, an accordion-fold booklet will be published featuring a new work and an interview with Akosua Viktoria Adu-Sanyah.