Zohra Opoku is something like a renaissance woman. She designs and makes clothes but doesn’t identify as a fashion designer, more like another vehicle of her creativity. And while the attire is striking, she uses the pieces to communicate cultural allegiances, familial traditions, personal style to create an autobiography.
Opoku, dissatisfied with the options available to her in East Germany, began this work at 12-years-old.
She told i-D, “ I actually created my first winter jacket out of scraps of jeans with neon yellow pieces. Expressing myself with individual style seemed to me to be the only way to escape from the grey reality of the GDR (German Democratic Republic.)”
Today, Opoku living in Accra, Ghana where she works as a multimedia artist, using everything from sculpture to photography to spread her messages. And of course the clothes. She’s designed installations using second-hand clothes, printed photographs on bedsheets to evoke images of laundry hanging and focuses heavily on African textiles.
In an interview with Omenka she said, “Textiles feel like the perfect vehicle with which identity can be performed. It is the outcome of my research on how fashion, trends and clothes traditions are related to a cultural identity that I then perform in my photographs, videos, sculptures and installations.”
A series of Opoku’s work, photographic self-portraits, are on view this week at The Armory Fair in New York City. The Armory Show in New York. (Piers 92 & 94 at 711 12th Avenue between 54th and 52nd Sts.) Check out some of the photos and Opoku’s other work on the following pages.
The post This Ghanaian-German Artist Uses Photography, Fashion & More To Share Culture And Identity appeared first on MadameNoire.