Zohra Opoku at Armory Show

Zohra Opoku installation, Armory Show, March 2017

I am delighted that the Mariane Ibrahim Gallery’s solo display of multimedia works by the German-Ghanaian artist Zohra Opoku, has been awarded the first Presents award at the current Armory Show in New York City:

http://theartnewspaper.com/market/art-fairs/young-seattle-gallery-wins-first-10-000-presents-prize-at-the-armory-show/

I enjoyed writing the gallery notes for the Zohra Opoku installation, as follows:

UNRAVELED THREADS

In this compelling body of work, the German/Ghanian multimedia artist Zohra Opoku meditates upon the overlapping strands of her complex family history. She was born in the GDR, the former East Germany, to a German mother, Brigitte Gerda Marlies Jurk, and a Ghanaian father, Dr. George Bob Kwabena Opoku. Her father, an Asante royal, returned to Ghana soon after her birth; her mother had to remain in East Germany, and raised Zohra under challenging circumstances.

On cotton and canvas surfaces, the artist has printed photographs of her father wearing his regalia as the Asante monarch Nana Opoku Gyabaah II, Chidomhene of Asato/Akan, within the Ghana’s Volta Region. Zohra herself has no direct memories of her father, and has had to reconstruct her father’s story, and her relationship to Akan spiritual worlds, through her mother’s distant recollections and the memories of her younger siblings, who came of age in Ghana.  Significantly, she has reworked photographs given to her by her Ghanaian siblings after her father’s death; these images on cloth highlight both the profound distance between the artist and her father’s homeland, and the continuing work of reestablishing intimate family bonds.

The blurriness of the images is, the artist explains, not intentional,  but in a rather fortuitous fashion it evokes ambiguous spaces between imagination and direct knowledge, between dreams and narrative, and between the modern world and the ancient past. Her artistic process involves repeatedly washing out by hand photographic screens, introducing the errors and disruptions inevitably accumulated across geographical distance and the passage of time, as family stories are told and retold. Photography here functions as a form of divination, bringing the honored Dead into dynamic relationships with their living descendants across the great divides between worlds. This sense of mysterious intimacy is intensified by the presence in many photographs of sacred trees and sacred groves, which in Akan cosmology serve as portals to the life-giving powers of divinities and ancestors.

Into these assemblages, the artist has worked kente woven cloth, historically reserved for those of royal rank among Akan-speaking peoples. She honors the intricate, sacred symbolism of kente, whose color combinations bear profound meanings and sacred potencies. In so doing, she weaves together her father’s royal lineage and her own immediate family histories, including ties to her East German mother.  She incorporates wool thread once owned by her mother in a manner that  echoes weaved stripes joined together in Kente, both binding together her parents' disparate lineages and highlighting their distinctions. In so doing, she explores her own interstitial status in the global system of racial identities: in Ghana she is classified as a “white woman,” while in Germany she would be considered a person of color. Her work creates sheltering spaces for all persons who have multiple, overlapping heritage, who seek a sense of belonging and acceptance in a world that seems increasingly obsessed with division and exclusion. Within these encompassing, welcoming garments, all of us are given a glimpse of home and homecoming, and a tangible reminder that there is always, somewhere, a place for us.

-Commentary by Mark Auslander