Akosua Viktoria Adu-Sanyah

Opening: February 28, 2026, 6 pm

For her first comprehensive institutional solo exhibition of the group of works entitled RESIDUAL SKY, the artist Akosua Viktoria Adu-Sanyah (b.1990, living and working in Zurich) creates large-format, manually exposed and enlarged colour photographs based on historical negatives of her father’s birthplace in what is today Ghana originating from the British Empire and Commonwealth Collection in Bristol. 

 
Adu-Sanyah’s work does not focus on the people shown, whose depiction and staging reproduces the violent hierarchies of the British colonial context, but instead selects details from the upper third of the images – the sky and the crowns of trees – which she then multiplies, swivels, condenses, and then physically appropriates through the manual process of enlargement and developing.
 
In the sense of “residual” as “an internal aftereffect of experience or activity that influences later behavior” (Merriam-Webster), the artist pursues those visible and invisible traces and “residues” – chemical, historical, emotional – that the experience of encountering these photographs have left behind over time. She constantly questions supposed certainties and fixations, seeking an open (visual) space in which new relationships become possible.  
 
Curated by Annette Amberg. 
 
Akosua Viktoria Adu-Sanyah (*1990, lives and works in Zurich) studied at the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste Saar in Saarbrücken. Her most recent solo exhibitions include: at the Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, the Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken, and no flowers, Centre Culturel Suisse de Paris (all 2026); Hypoxia, Jan Kaps, Cologne (2025); Corner Dry Lungs, Zollamt MMK, Frankfurt am Main, and The House Is A Body, Georgian House Museum and Bristol Photo Festival, Bristol (both 2024); Behold The Ocean, Centre Photographie Genève, Geneva, and May I Dream?, Photoforum Pasquart, Biel (both 2022). Her works have been shown in numerous group exhibitions, including: Alexander Tutsek Foundation (2025); Foam Museum, Amsterdam (2024); Centre de la Photographie, Geneva, and Helmhaus, Zurich (both 2024); Gia Lam Train Factory, Hanoi, Lothringer 13 Halle, Munich, and Kunsthalle Trier, Trier (both 2023). Her works have won various awards, including: the Borlem Preis and Swiss Art Award (2024); with a work grant from the Canton of Zurich and an art scholarship from the City of Zurich (2023); the Louis Roederer Photography Prize for Sustainability (2022); the Prix d’Art Robert Schuman (2021); the Prix Photoforum (2020).  

The realisation of the exhibition is made possible by the generous support of: Kanton Zürich