Zohra Opoku –
We were Queens and Kings
ANO, Accra 2017
How are modernities formed? What are their gestures and external manifestations? What are their dynamics and processes of exchange? What is lost and gained in evolution, transformation and change?
The history of photography in Ghana is almost as old as it is elsewhere in the world. Only three years after the production of the daguerreotype by Daguerre in 1839, the French captain Bouet produced one in Elmina. Studios proliferated in the 1890s in response to advances that made cameras light and more portable and processing images easier. In the nineteenth Century, modernity on the West Coast of Africa was being precipitated through trade with Europe and the ensuing rise in technology. The photographic image became both archive and repository of collective memory.
My art history teacher John Picton once pointed out to me that the seeming formal continuity between figurative sculptural traditions, such as those of compositions of early photography could be seen in sculptural forms, such as those of 16th century plaques of Benin, Kalabari sculpture traditions and shrine sculptures, and what he called the ‘stiff hieratic regard’ in some West African photographic traditions, with figures lined up, side by side, looking straight out.
These photographs, captured in Ghana by photographers, such as J.K Bruce-Vanderpuije, Felicia Abban and James Barnor carry with them a particular rhythmical, symmetrical formality; portraying the socialisation of the body, of the individual, through dress – fishermen, merchants, clerks, schoolteachers, civil servants, nurses, telephonists, clerks, schoolchildren, as well as Queen-mothers and Kings, in their finest garments.
The artist Zohra Opoku has turned these depictions upside down by placing her subjects in second-hand clothing imported from the West, replacing handcrafted methods, such as the kente, batakari, adinkra, and prints from home-grown (and foreign) textiles industries, such as Akosombo Textiles.
What impact do these imported textiles have on our particular modernity? What portrait do they, and the wooden sculptures the artist has collected, form of our city? These questions will be embodied in a procession from Osu Castle, mirroring the ongoing processions, the Gesamtkunstwerke, of the synchronistic Homowo processions, and their more contemporary manifestations in the Chale Wote festival.
