BEHOLD THE OCEAN
RESILIENCE
INHERITANCE – POEMS OF NON-BELONGING
This website currently shows the three larger projects from 2020/2021. All of them are currently being worked on in terms of producing books, films, and shows. The work documentation from the last decade will be added at a later stage. To request a portfolio with my work from 2012-2019 please send an email to ava[at]akosuaviktoria.com – please specify whether you’re interested in artistic and conceptual or editorial and portrait work, or all of it.
BEHOLD THE OCEAN
Behold The Ocean is a visual storytelling project about climate research circumstances in the southernmost of Patagonia. During the global pandemic in December 2020, the two young Chilean ocean scientists Maximiliano Vergara and Marco Pinto embark on an expedition on the Strait of Magellan to the glacier of Santa Inés. Their research focuses on changes in the marine ecosystem that are triggered by climate change. Behold The Ocean is unique in its vulnerability regarding the concept of science.
The production of knowledge is an innately human experience, accompanied by failure, love, and sacrifice.
‘Es misteriosa. Es una persona que a veces está tranquila, y de repente muestra su valentía, su fuerza. Hay que entender qué cosas se guarda para sí misma, cuáles son los tesoros que tiene escondidos en su interior. Como toda persona, tiene características únicas que nos hacen apreciar su belleza, ya sea interior o exterior. Por tanto, el océano es una persona a la que tenemos que aprender a amar, a apreciar y también a aceptar su forma de ser.’
‘We can’t protect what we don’t know.’
RESILIENCE
‘I don’t suffer.’
RESILIENCE is an ongoing film and
photography project about my father’s new life as a severely
disabled and blind man. He survived a blood loss of almost 70% during
prostate surgery in 2016. The doctors involved had not supplied him
with a blood transfusion despite him losing the blood in front of them. The
blood loss caused his nervous system to break down, and the optic nerve
was shut down by his body as a result. In his apartment near Frankfurt, he
lives by himself, exploring healing plants and herbs from Ghana to find
substitutes for his industrial medications with critical side-effects.
photography project about my father’s new life as a severely
disabled and blind man. He survived a blood loss of almost 70% during
prostate surgery in 2016. The doctors involved had not supplied him
with a blood transfusion despite him losing the blood in front of them. The
blood loss caused his nervous system to break down, and the optic nerve
was shut down by his body as a result. In his apartment near Frankfurt, he
lives by himself, exploring healing plants and herbs from Ghana to find
substitutes for his industrial medications with critical side-effects.
INHERITANCE
POEMS OF NON-BELONGING
Stephen Kofi Adu-Sanyah
and
Gabriele Maria Adu-Sanyah née Schlüter
two black and white prints
70 cm x 50 cm each
2020
In 2016 my father became a victim of a tragic surgical mistake related to racial bias that caused hospital staff to believe that regardless of his age (he was almost 70 at that time), he had enough stamina to get through prostate surgery without blood transfusion. It turned out that he did not have enough stamina, and the staff’s decision brought about a blood loss of almost 70% that resulted in severe damage to his nervous system. A few days later, the breakdown led to my father losing his eyesight. Since then, he never recovered from the loss and lives as a blind man in his apartment near Frankfurt. Although divorced, my mother took care of him and supported him in finding legal justice for almost five years.
skins
photographic sculpture
deerskin, light-sensitive silver chlorobromide emulsion
approximately 40 cm x 40 cm
2020
Deerskin coated with light-sensitive chlorobromide emulsion,
exposed with a black-and-white negative of a macro photograph of my skin. Developed, fixed, rinsed, and dried.
Then repeatedly partly soaked, folded, and dried.
stone
photographic sculpture
1 m2 bourette silk, light-sensitive silver chlorobromide emulsion, white thread
approx. 20 x 20 x 20 cm
2020
Roughly one square meter of 140gr/m bourette silk coated with light-sensitive chlorobromide emulsion, then exposed multiple times with a black-and-white negative of a macro photograph of my skin. Soaked in the developer, then fixed, soaked in water, dried, folded, crumpled, loosely kept in shape with white thread. Photographic emulsion is highly vulnerable, leading to a landscape of unevenly distributed scars, reminiscent of my own body. The wounds my skin has made space for are there to stay, as I am prone to hyperpigmentation, and my skin needs years to heal from even the tiniest damage.
Wilhelm Schlüter
Piezography Pro print between glass
105 x 65 x 0.4 cm
2020 Wilhelm Schlüter was Obergefreiter in the Wehrmacht’s Luftwaffe during World War II. He died in Germany after being unable to recover from war captivity in Russia. The original hand-sized vintage silver gelatin print is marked with ‘1933/1934’ and ‘Holland’ on the back. It is part of a family archive, but this particular portrait of my great-grandfather has been haunting me for years. Is this a man I could have had a conversation with? Would he have been interested in knowing what concerns me? What does it mean to be family, to be familiar? There is a fondness in me towards this man that seems deeply contradictory. The large-format reproduction of this photograph serves as a tool of connection that allows for moving beyond the function of mere representation of a historical moment.
white gaze II black square
photographic sculpture
light-sensitive glossy baryta paper exposed with white light
100 cm x 100 cm
2020
A sheet of light-sensitive glossy paper exposed with pure white light, developed, fixed, rinsed, dried, scrunched, and re-flattened. Through reflection, the irregular surface of the black image produces dozens of white areas depending on the point of view.In June 2020, global protests against police brutality against Black people and People of Color were triggered by the case of the white police officer Derek Chauvin murdering the African-American man George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for eight minutes and forty-six seconds on the 25th of May in Minneapolis. Thousands of black tiles with the hashtag #blackouttuesday were posted on Instagram in the name of solidarity – also by Swiss cultural institutions. The morning I logged into Instagram again after some deliberate days of absence, I felt sick in my stomach. The feed of eternal blackness made me throw up. My brain could not grasp the vast discrepancy of the graphic murder so many of us had witnessed through mainstream media versus the trivial reactivity it had triggered on social media as a means for selfish representation, disguised as left-leaning solidarity. Had anyone posting questioned how the receiving end would be affected? No. Instead of imagining how someone's feed would appear, the focus was on one's own, supposedly singular action. 'Mach mal halblang.' (German for 'give me a break.'), 'this is my own journey.', and 'one step to generate awareness doesn't exclude other actions.' were some of the replies I received from white people after I had expressed discontent in the form of a 'think before you post.'-comment.
colors of woman I
vertical video piece
8 min 45 sec, no sound, size variable
2020
One drop of black ink slowly dilutes a body of water. Different shapes are formed throughout the process, transforming into more even texture. A thorough homogenization of the two liquids is never achieved. On the left, you can see six stills from the video piece. The first and last still selected equal the first and last frame of the piece. The One Drop Rule was a U.S.-American law passed in 1911 in Arkansas, that made interracial engagement a crime. It considered every person with any percentage of African blood as Black and thus inferior. The law disappeared in 1975, but the negative perception of biracial children remained within a society that was built on white supremacy:
not a crow, not in a gallery
silver gelatin print
24 x 18 cm
2019/2020 A raven on display during the MY GARDEN OF EDEN exhibition at gallery Christophe Guye in 2019. The bird was not a piece from a partic-ipating artist, but a decorative object borrowed from a taxidermist. It was photographed through the window from outside. Jim Crow laws were a collection of state and local statutes that legalized racial segregation. Named after a Black minstrel show character, the laws – which existed for about 100 years, from the post-Civil War era until 1968 – were meant to marginalize African Americans by denying them the right to vote, hold jobs, get an education or other opportunities.
Inheritance – Poems of Non-Belonging has been awarded the Prix Photoforum 2020.
This interview I gave for FLARE provides more insight: medium.com/flare-photoforum
First to be seen in a group show at Photoforum Pasquart in Biel, Switzerland from the 3rd of March - 4th of April 2021. Current measures implied by the Swiss government don’t allow for an official opening.
Not all of the existing pieces are shown on this site. Please contact me for more information.
