Vanessa Amoah Opoku: Synthesizing Realities

What connects us to a home, to others, and to where we come from, even across distance? How do images come into being that not only depict but also forge relationships? Synthesizing Realities takes its starting point from the eponymous artist’s book, which we—the artist and the critic—developed in 2025 and 2026, and in which we synthesized our perspectives on the relationship between our bodies and technologies, on digital sensing, and decolonial forms of photographic images. In our conversations, Vanessa Amoah Opoku’s installations took center stage. For several years now, the artist has been deliberately using sensing technologies that embody colonial logics. By altering their use, Opoku transforms these instruments of measurement and of control into means for actively shaping self-determined narrative and portrayal by racialized bodies. In this context, diaspora is not seen as a loss, but as a condition from which new technologies of relationship emerge.

The book gathers contributions by the editor, the artist, artist and writer Steph Holl-Trieu, and philosopher Shirin Weigelt. The design was created by Louise Borinski and Fred Heinsohn. Published by DISTANZ, Berlin 2026.

June Drevet is an art critic, writer, curator, and editor whose work focuses on contemporary photography, video art, and the political dimensions of visual culture. 

Vanessa Amoah Opoku is a German-Ghanaian interdisciplinary artist who transforms imperial surveying technologies such as LiDAR into relational tools, assembling multifaceted installations from fragmented point-cloud scans using wax, textiles, sound, and digital fragments. Her work explores how diaspora and displacement generate their own technologies of relation and connection.

The exhibition is part of “Anstoß – the Art Criticism Fellowship of the Jürgen Ponto-Stiftung in cooperation with AICA Germany.” The program involves the annual awarding of fellowships to one art critic and one artist, as well as the development and publication of a book; the subsequent exhibition is made possible by the kata agorein Stiftung.