In conversation with • Aleena Chia.
Media studies scholar Aleena Chia and artist Vanessa Amoah Opoku will take you on a tour through volumetric fragments and technological imaginaries of what we have come to know as the Metaverse. Rather than putting artistic engagements in opposition to the metaverse moment, they will explore the complicity and partiality of reality capture as a technical infrastructure for the assembly of a sharded rather than seamless metaverse. Tracing the legacies of racial classification and extractivism in biometric and environmental capture, this conversation reflects on how the unruliness of the body dis/assembles the metaverse’s components-first approach to worldbuilding.
Biography
Vanessa Amoah Opoku is an interdisciplinary artist exploring history, digitality, and marginalized narratives through mixed realities. She uses art, science, and technology to challenge conventional notions of innovation and future visions. Her primary artistic tools include 3D scans, video, sculpture, performance, and sound.
Opoku is part of the artist collective PARA. This collective focuses on interdisciplinary and site-specific installations and performing arts, addressing topics like chronopolitics, future heritage, and speculative feelings. Since 2021, she has served as the art curator for the Balance Club Culture Festival, a platform that examines the political significance of club culture, its role within various communities, and its contributions to technological and cultural progression.
She studied Book Art and Graphic Design, Art and Digital Media, and Photography at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, and Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design Jerusalem. In September 2021, she obtained a Diploma in Fine Arts under the guidance of Prof. Tina Bara at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig.
Opoku has been the recipient of a scholarship from the Rosa-Luxemburg-Foundation and won the "gute aussichten – junge deutsche fotografie // new german photography 2021/2022" award. Her work has been exhibited at Deichtorhallen Hamburg, die Angewandte Wien, Grassi Museum Leipzig, Künstlerhaus Dortmund, Halle 14 Leipzig, (im)Mutable Studio Los Angeles, and in solo exhibitions at Synnika Frankfurt, Times Museum's Huangbian Station Contemporary Art Research Center (HBS) in Guangzhou, China, and EIGEN+ART Lab, Berlin.
Credits: Naomi Rado