Zohra Opoku

Queens and Kings 2017 is a monumental photographic composition, screen-printed in blue, red and black inks onto a patchwork of cotton jacquard and other cotton-rich fabric supports, stitched together in a three metre by eight metre grid and trimmed along the lower margin with black and white synthetic tassel fringe. This pieced-together compositional structure obliquely references Ghanaian Kente cloth, a traditional strip-woven fabric produced by highly skilled craftsmen for leaders to wear at important gatherings. Originally woven from fine silk, Kente cloth today is usually woven from cotton, rendering it widely accessible beyond society’s upper echelons. It remains the material symbol of Ghana’s cultural history.
Nine figures occupy respective portions of the composition, somewhat reminiscent of an Asante court gathering of the type depicted as a panoramic view by the writer, traveller and artist Thomas Bowdich (1791–1824) in his aquatint The First Day of the Yam Custom 1819 (Royal Museums, Greenwich). Their positioning around a central mountainous pile of garments is carefully staged by Opoku to evoke historic Asante power structures – where the King (or Asantehene) is enthroned on a sacred stool, surrounded by chiefs, elders and local officials called obirempons, thereby evoking the Queens and Kings of the work’s title. Each subject’s face is obscured by foliage, palm fronds and other plants native to Ghana, a feature of the artist’s portraits since 2014.

In Opoku’s semi-autobiographical work, forms of masquerade are allegories of cultural assimilation and belonging, externalising a personal connection to the local land. Queens and Kings emerges from Opoku’s ongoing series WHO IS WEARING MY T-SHIRT, which explores the relationships between imports of textile waste to Ghana, the legacies of traditional Ghanaian attire, and globalisation. Trained as a fashion and textiles designer, Opoku uses materials typical of fashion production – silk, linen, cotton and blended fabrics – as supports for her printed photographs. In this way, she explores not only historical representations of power and portrayal in Ghanaian society but also mines the present-day external markers of power demonstrated through conspicuous consumption, notably of clothing. Prior to undertaking Queens and Kings, with its mountain of garments, the artist staged a large site-specific intervention across Central Accra, The Billboard Project 2014–15, draping second-hand clothing over vacant billboard and urban hoardings to draw attention to the redundant Western clothing that floods into local African markets.

Further reading
Oliver Enwonwu and Ateroghene Akpojiyovbi, ‘The Contextual Textiles of Zohra Opoku’, Omenka Magazine, 30 December 2016, http://www.omenkaonline.com/contextual-textiles-zohra-opoku/, accessed 4 March 2019.
‘In Conversation with Zohra Opoku: From Ghana to Bahia’, C&, 3 July 2017, http://www.contemporaryand.com/de/magazines/from-ghana-to-bahia/, accessed 1 March 2019.

Zoe Whitley, March 2019
Updated by Osei Bonsu, June 2020