no flowers
At its center is my father. Following his death in 2021—without funeral, without ceremony—the work develops as a delayed gesture of attendance. Flowers accumulate around his image: excessive, artificial, unstable.
The images originate from a small number of photographic negatives, processed through an image-to-image generative system without the use of language, and subsequently translated back into negative material and printed in the darkroom. Distortion and return operate as a single movement: the image is broken, then brought back into physical presence.
Fragments from my father’s clinical synopsis reappear as contact-printed images. Technical language, originally detached from the body it describes, is here rendered as matter.
The book itself is conceived as a site of holding—where image, text, and process converge as a form of insistence.
no flowers (2026) is an artist book and forms a chapter within the body of work DELIRIUM.
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
2026
no flowers
152 pages, 24 X 18 cm, hardcover
published by Akosua Viktoria Adu-Sanyah and Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris
ISBN 978-3-033-11621-4
CHF 38
Purchase:
Limited editions (images below):
Edition I — Plate
handmade chromogenic print mounted on metal, 18 × 24 cm
edition of 21
Edition II — Photographic Object
handmade chromogenic print mounted on metal and wooden frame, 44 × 34 cm
edition of 9 + 1 AP
no flowers
Limited editions:
Limited editions:
Edition I — Plate
handmade chromogenic print mounted on metal
18 × 24 cm
edition of 21
includes a signed copy of no flowers
Edition II — Photographic Object
handmade chromogenic print mounted on metal and wooden frame, 44 × 34 cm
edition of 9 + 1 AP
includes a signed copy of no flowers
On the making of this book
It began as an offering.
My father did not have a funeral. There was no ritual, no gathering, no flowers. Nothing that would mark an ending or allow his body to be held and released by others. The absence of that gesture stays with me as something unresolved.
At the center of this book is him. Flowers accumulate around his image. Perhaps the book itself becomes a grave. I thought of my grandmother’s burial in Sanfo, Ghana: an overwhelming profusion of plastic flowers there. I think of how gestures persist even when conditions change.
The flowers in this book are given belatedly, excessively, imperfectly.
But they attend.
There was a period when I could not yet return to the darkroom. The work of being alone in darkness, of sustained attention, required a stability I did not have then. Still, the images insisted. I worked with a small number of existing negatives, allowing them to pass through an artificial intelligence system without the use of language. It was a temporary psychological shelter.
The images were brought back from that system—distorted, broken—transferred onto negative material, re-entered into the darkroom, and pulled into physical presence again. This return to matter was a refusal of erasure. I thought that disappearance cannot be the final condition. If the body was abandoned, the image would not be.
Fragments of my father’s medical report appear here, contact-printed as images in the darkroom. The original document describes his body in technical language—precise, detached, procedural. It documents symptoms without bearing witness to his suffering. Here, language dissolves into physical matter as a necessity.
The darkrooms in which this work was made are not neutral infrastructures. Some were borrowed, some improvised, and built by my own hands. The work shaped the darkroom as much as the darkroom shaped the work. The paper was exposed with the book in mind, as an original field to live on the page. In this sense, the book was made in the darkroom.
Postscript
After my father was injured by medical negligence in 2016 in a German hospital, his body became a site of constant collapse. What followed—blindness, neurological damage, pain—was not something that could be narrated. It could only be endured. When he died in Accra in 2021, his cremation happened quickly, under administrative pressure during the pandemic, without our presence. Nothing marked his passing.
no flowers
Concept, photographs, chromogenic and silver gelatin darkroom prints, text, editing, sequencing, design:
Akosua Viktoria Adu-Sanyah
Printing and binding:
MAS Matbaa, Istanbul
This publication was made possible with the support of:
Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia, Kanton Zürich, Stadt Zürich Kultur, Burgauer Stiftung