Zohra Opoku: We Proceed in the Footsteps of the Sunlight

Zeitz MOCAA presents We Proceed in the Footsteps of the Sunlight. The first museum survey exhibition of Ghanaian-German artist Zohra Opoku brings together textured expressions of personal history and cultural inheritance, revealing an artistic journey in constant motion. The themes unfolding in the exhibition also resonate in her C& Artist’s Edition Give me back my black dolls, 2024, created as a continuation of her exploration of heritage and selfhood. A few editions are still available – contact editions@contemporaryand.com.

Tracing a decade of quiet revolutions in cloth, memory, and self, the exhibition brings together textured expressions of personal history and cultural inheritance, revealing an artistic journey in constant motion. Curated by Beata America and Dr Phokeng Setai, the exhibition opens on Thursday, 11 September 2025 on Level 3 Elevator Side of the museum and runs until 4 October 2026.

Born in 1976 in Altdöbern (former GDR/East Germany), Opoku later relocated to Accra, Ghana, to reconnect with her ancestral roots. She now lives and works in Accra, represented by Mariane Ibrahim (Chicago, Paris, Mexico City). Her multidisciplinary practice, deeply rooted in personal history and cultural heritage, explores the layered intersections of identity and memory, bridging cultures, geographies, and time.

For Opoku, this dialogue becomes a form of visual storytelling—an evolving, textured archive of identity that is both intimate and quietly powerful. Trained in fashion design and photography in Germany, Opoku extends her command of textiles into a layered visual language, moving fluidly between photography, printmaking, and textile-based installation. Fabric emerges as a generative medium through which questions of identity, memory, and ancestral lineage are thoughtfully explored. These themes unfold across the breadth of her practice, as she turns to printmaking, photography, and sculpture as complementary mediums for reflecting on selfhood and lived experience.

This survey maps the artist’s trajectory over the past decade through several major bodies of work, anchored by three recurring elements: Water — signalling the fluidity of practice and sanctification of daily rituals, as seen in After the prayer / before the prayer (2018); Breath — the life force that feeds the spirit, suspended between life and death, explored in The Myths of Eternal Life (2020–2024); Ground — the stabilising force of nature, a site of comfort, rootedness, identity, and familial belonging, depicted in Queen Mothers (2016), Unraveled Threads (2017) and Give Me Back My Black Dolls (2024–ongoing).

The title, We Proceed in the Footsteps of the Sunlight, is drawn from the Book of the Dead—also known as Coming Forth by Day—an ancient Egyptian funerary text guiding the soul beyond the physical world. In Opoku’s interpretation, it becomes a quiet declaration: a record of passage through turbulence and a signpost to the path ahead. The full extract reads: I proceed in the footsteps of the sunlight. I am one who knows the path of secrets (and) the Gate of the Field of Reeds. I exist therein. See me, I am come. I have overthrown my enemies upon the earth. My corpse, it is buried.

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