At Zeitz MOCAA, ‘We Proceed in the Footsteps of the Sunlight’ traces a decade of Zohra Opoku’s exploration of identity, ancestry and belonging through photography, textiles and the intimate materiality of memory.
2 September 2026
In ‘We Proceed in the Footsteps of the Sunlight’, Ghanaian-German artist Zohra Opoku brings together ten years of a practice shaped by movement, inheritance and the continual reconstruction of self. Presented at Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town, the exhibition is Opoku’s first museum survey and is curated by Beata America and Dr Phokeng Setai.
Born in East Germany and later relocating to Accra to reconnect with her ancestral roots, Opoku works across photography, printmaking, textiles, sculpture and installation. Fabric becomes both surface and archive, carrying questions of cultural inheritance, family, displacement and belonging across generations and geographies.
Structured around the recurring elements of water, breath and ground, the exhibition brings together significant bodies of work including Queen Mothers, Unravelled Threads, The Myths of Eternal Life and Give Me Back My Black Dolls. Together, they reveal an artistic language in which personal experience opens onto broader conversations about diasporic identity and memory.
Taking its title from the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, ‘We Proceed in the Footsteps of the Sunlight’ considers passage, transformation and what it means to know the path forward.
This exhibition will be on view at the Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town, from 11 September until 4 October 2026.
