Zohra Opoku’s First Museum Survey at Zeitz MOCAA Maps a Life Between Ghana and Germany
A studio visit in Accra has become a museum survey in Cape Town. Zohra Opoku’s first museum exhibition, “We Proceed in the Footsteps of the Sunlight,” opened in September at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA), bringing together textiles, photography, screenprints, installations, and sculptures that trace the Ghanaian German artist’s evolving practice.
Curated by Beata America and Phokeng Setai, the exhibition remains on view through October 4. Its title comes from a passage in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, a funerary text that guides the soul beyond the physical world, and the show is organized around three recurring ideas in Opoku’s work: water, breath, and ground. Together, they frame a practice concerned with ritual, mortality, rootedness, and the fragile continuity of memory.
America said the project began during a 2023 research trip to Ghana, when she and colleague Julia Kabat visited Opoku’s studio in Accra. Koyo Kouoh, the late Zeitz MOCAA director, had long spoken highly of the artist, and America said she was immediately drawn to the work. That encounter eventually led to the museum survey.
For Opoku, the exhibition carries a particular emotional weight. Speaking from Accra, she described the experience as surreal, saying it felt like watching her life from the outside. She also pointed to the significance of presenting the work in a space shaped by Kouoh’s legacy, noting that Kouoh’s footprint was enormous.
Born in 1976 in Altdöbern, in former East Germany, to a Ghanaian father and a German mother, Opoku first visited Ghana in 2003 and relocated there about eight years later. She has said the move deepened her connection to her father’s heritage and sharpened her research-based practice. At Zeitz MOCAA, that history is visible in the way the exhibition links personal memory to broader cultural inheritance.
One of the show’s key works, “QueenMothers” (2016), examines the influence of matriarchs in southern Ghanaian communities. To develop the project, Opoku spoke with queen mothers across the region and photographed them performing Adowa, an Ashanti dance, in an effort to capture their spirit, dress, and presence. She also drew on research at the University of Ghana in Accra and the African studies department at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi.
Mariane Ibrahim has described Opoku as a “woven storyteller” and a “shapeshifter,” a formulation that fits an artist whose work moves fluidly across media while remaining anchored in questions of belonging, transmission, and what survives when memory is not written down. At Zeitz MOCAA, those concerns are given museum scale for the first time.
