Zeitz MOCAA opens Zohra Opoku’s first museum survey exhibition

This September, Zeitz MOCAA opens a landmark exhibition that feels especially fitting for South Africa’s Heritage Month. We Proceed in the Footsteps of the Sunlight is the first museum survey of Ghanaian-German artist Zohra Opoku.

The exhibition brings together ten years of her work in textiles, photography, printmaking, and installation - opening on Thursday, 11 September 2025, and running until 4 October 2026.

In the context of Heritage Month, Opoku’s exhibition feels like a gentle yet powerful reminder that heritage isn’t static: it’s something we carry, reshape, and sometimes rediscover.

Born in East Germany, Opoku moved to Ghana to reconnect with her roots. Her work captures that sense of being between worlds - holding on to ancestry while shaping a future.

Her story resonates far beyond Ghana or Germany, speaking to anyone who has asked where they come from, or how our individual backgrounds continue to guide us.

Through fabric, memory, and ritual, Opoku explores how identity is formed and passed on, especially when those identities stretch across continents, borders and generations.

Unlike a solo exhibition that spotlights a single project, this museum survey zooms out, letting us trace how Opoku’s ideas and style have grown over time.

Here, her work circles back to three recurring forces: Water (ritual and flow), Breath (life force and spirit), and Ground (belonging and rootedness).

By bringing her cross-continental story to Cape Town during Heritage Month, the exhibition invites us to reflect on how African heritage continues to shape identity.  

The title draws from the Book of the Dead, reframing an ancient Egyptian funerary text as a contemporary testament to declaration serving as 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.   

Co-curator Beata America states, "The curatorial intent speaks to emotional fortitude,  mental tenderness, and spiritual depth, positioning Opoku at the centre of her universe - steady and alert - both protector of, and protected by, the life-giving sun that illuminates her path. The exhibition stands as an homage to ancestral presence and future lineage, grounded  in the knowledge that while life is fleeting, the soul endures."

We Proceed in the Footsteps of the Sunlight is curated by Beata America and Dr Phokeng Setai and forms part of Zeitz MOCAA’s programme to spotlight major voices that extend conversations about identity, lineage, and the global resonance of African contemporary art.

ICYMI: The Culture Edit: Art, memory and reverence of soft vengeance