RESIDUAL SKY
2024 – ONGOING
2024 – ONGOING
Archives exhaust me.
While looking at these images, I kept remembering how I once stood in the slave dungeons of Elmina Castle shortly before my father’s death. I imagined how, more than a hundred years ago, someone carried the negatives into a laboratory to expose what I now hold in my hands.
The photographs I encountered were preserved in the archives of the British Empire and Commonwealth Collection in Bristol.
They were taken in the former British colony Gold Coast (today Ghana), the region where my father was born.
Yellowing black-and-white prints on silver gelatin paper, the size of my palm.
Many of these images reproduce the visual hierarchies of colonial rule. Instead of engaging with the figures depicted in them, I began to work with the upper part of the photographs — fragments of sky and tree canopies. I cut away the people and transfer the remaining fragments back onto medium-format colour film, which I take to the darkroom to transform into fields of colour.
RESIDUAL SKY marks a shift in my practice. After working for over a decade in laboratories that were not my own, I built a colour darkroom with my own two hands to develop large-scale chromogenic photographs entirely by hand. The prints are produced without machines, allowing the chemistry to move toward exhaustion over the course of the production cycle.
This body of work emerged from an invitation by Bristol Photo Festival in 2024.
Exhibition views at Kunsthaus Glarus, 2026 – hand-developed chromogenic prints on okoumé wood and spruce frame with white wash
RESIDUAL SKY
2024–ongoing
Photographic objects (large-scale chromogenic prints, hand-developed, wooden support)
Dimensions variable
First institutional presentation:
Kunsthaus Glarus, 2026
Upcoming presentation:
Deichtorhallen Hamburg, 2026
Triennial of Photography Hamburg