After completing a Master’s degree in Fashion at Hamburg’s University of Applied Sciences and briefly working in fashion design, Zohra Opoku turned to textile cultures beyond fashion, particularly the conventions of traditional Ghanaian dress. She eventually ventured into collage and experimented with photography, which continues to feature in much of her work. Opoku has worked with a variety of textiles but has also used wood to explore the abstract levels of her heritage and identity. Currently based in Accra, Opoku was born to a German mother and a Ghanaian father in Brandenburg, at the time part of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Through her practice, she captures and speaks to the particularities of her relationship with Ghana and West Africa, and the diasporic condition more broadly. In many of her works, she employs techniques and technologies of printing and embedding to (re)inscribe them with tactile and visual narratives that investigate processes of identity-making, often integrating family heirlooms and self-portraits, to invoke personal narratives at the centre of broader questions around cultural memory. In Unraveled Threads (2017), Opoku presents a series of prints that embed her personal exploration of self and place in a complex collage of image and fabric. Kente, a traditional Akan fabric, and denim intertwine with one another as well as with a personal archive of images of the artist and her family. With no direct access to her father’s memories, Opoku reconstructs his story through cultural products of Ghana, stories shared by her siblings, and the accounts of her mother. For Echos der Bruderländer, the artist revisits her Self-Portraits (2015–16), which she presents in this context as a series of flags arranged along the Anna Seghers Garden that leads to the building. The artist, as the subject of the portrait, is captured in tension between presence and obscurity; holding the camera’s gaze while also granted opacity through layers of natural elements. Rather than a classic representation of the self, Opoku’s self-portraits unfold the question of identity in all its complexity.

Co-produced by Zohra Opoku and Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), 2023–24.

Works in the exhibition: Self-Portraits (2015–16) series comprising CYPERUS PAPYRUS (2015); LIFE OAK (2015); RHODODENDRON (2016); WISTERIA (2015); PYRACANTHA (2016); DICKSPONIA ANTARCTICA (2015); FICUS CARICA (2015); SASSA (2016), 8 flags. Courtesy of the artist