PLANT STORIES #5: (UN-)CONTROLLED SPECIES AND QUEER ECOLOGIES
Discussion with Vanessa Amoah Opoku and Minh Duc Pham
30 AUGUST 2025 / 20:00
In his artistic practice, Minh Duc Pham works with memories and imaginations in which flowers appear as companions and cohabitants of humans. In his lecture performance, he reflects on his own queer and migrant upbringing through the medium of the orchid.
Various projects by Vanessa Amoah Opoku have dealt with botanical gardens and their colonial conditions. Her new installation questions these rather strange places, where plants from all over the world live in completely controlled environments that artificially imitate the living conditions of their places of origin. Using speculative and transformative techniques, Vanessa Amoah Opoku imagines new plant possibilities and resistances.
In conversation, the two artists reflect on their themes, research, and artistic approaches. Together, we consider various stories and imaginary worlds associated with plants, as well as their impact on social and ecological coexistence. How do controlled life forms deal with their conditions, how do they resist them, or transform them into something new?
In German, with simultaneous translation into English.
VANESSA AMOAH OPOKU is a German-Ghanaian interdisciplinary artist whose relational world-making practice explores history, digitality, and marginalized narratives through mixed realities. She has exhibited at institutions such as Belvedere 21 Vienna, Deichtorhallen Hamburg, and EIGEN+ART Lab Berlin, and was recently nominated for the S+T+ARTS Prize 2025. She teaches at HGK Basel FHNW, among others, and lives and works in Berlin and Basel.
MINH DUC PHAM is a visual artist and performer. He studied exhibition design at the HfG Karlsruhe and performance studies and design theory at the UdK Berlin. In his artistic practice, he addresses questions of identity and negotiates them at the intersections of gender, race, and class. His works have been exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts Leipzig, the Dresden City Museum, and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), among others. He has also participated in various theater and performance productions, including Die Große Klassenrevue at HAU1, Home Away From Home at the Cloud Gate Theatre in Taipei, and Semiotiken der Drecksarbeit at Mousonturm Frankfurt.