Tiwani Contemporary is pleased to present new photography and video by Los Angeles-based artist Zina Saro-Wiwa for Frieze London Viewing Room 2020. Showing for the first time at an art fair since a solo booth at Art Basel Miami in 2018, the artist presents work which explores emotional and psychological landscapes, African masquerade culture and spiritual ecosystems. Probing the subcutaneous layers of environmentalism, these works look at the psychosocial and cultural value of African forests. Saro-Wiwa also premieres a new three-channel film shot on location during lockdown across multiple sites in Ogoniland, Nigeria, Africa.
Across moving image, photography, performance and installation, the artist's work draws on ritual, food and folklore to explore decolonised notions of environment and environmentalism. Mapping mystical intimacies between people and the land belongs to an ongoing interest in emotional and psychic landscapes. In the past, she has explored the visible and unseen cultures of the Niger Delta offering a radically distinct and generative re-engagement of this biodiverse region in Nigeria that faces continuing deforestation and degradation.
Against this backdrop, the artist’s new photography and video explores the significance of the psychology of masking and how forests work as covert and mystical sites of exploration, magic, desire, praxis, confession, alterity and ultimately resistance. These works also aim to illuminate the politics around secrecy, gender-relations, our relationship to land and environmentalism uniquely revealing vital, new and potent links between culture and nature in the era of climate-crisis.
Zina Saro-Wiwa says: “My new work is a dream-like meditation on an imagined conversation between trees and humans in the context of an African forest. This is a work that sees the world through the ‘eyes’ of a tree as well as through the spiritual human eye or third eye. The work suggests that trees listen to us but also that they use us to tell their stories. They are instigators and very much alive. When you consider that masquerade culture is invented in the forest, and all manner of storytelling is inspired by the forest it brings the moral universe of trees into question. But the work also brings into question whether the spirit in question is a singular one that travels from human to tree or whether there are multiple agents at work."
In November 2020, the artist's critically acclaimed video series Table Manners will be exhibited in the world’s largest and longest running digital art exhibition on Times Square in New York, USA - synchronised on electronic billboards nightly. Later this year, she will be in conversation at MoMA in New York that will premiere an excerpt from a new alt-Nollywood feature film. She also participates in the forthcoming Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2020) and São Paulo Biennial (2021).
About the artist
Zina Saro-Wiwa (b. 1976, Port Harcourt, Nigeria) lives and works in Los Angeles, USA. She runs a practice in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria where she founded the contemporary art gallery Boys’ Quarters Project Space for which she regularly curates. Saro-Wiwa is one of Foreign Policy Magazine’s Global Thinkers of 2016 recognized for her work in the Niger Delta. She was Artist-in-Residence at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn 2016-2017 and in April 2017 was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for Fine Arts. In 2020, she was named Artist-in-Residence at UCLA where she is launching an experimental think tank and art project that renegotiates the relationship between knowledge and art production. In June 2020, she delivered the 2020 James S Coleman Memorial Lecture with her seminal film: Worrying the Mask, The Politics of Authenticity and Contemporaneity in the World of African Art.
Recent exhibitions include: Migros Museum of Contemporary Art, Switzerland; Edith-Russ-Haus for Media Art, Germany; The Fowler Museum, USA; Yale Center for British Art, USA; The Walther Collection, Germany; Bozar, Brussels; Arles Photo-Festival, France; Brooklyn Museum, USA; Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain; Nikolaj Kunstal, Denmark; The Menil Collection USA; and The Pulitzer Arts Foundation USA. Major solo exhibitions include The Krannert Museum and Blaffer Museum USA. Screenings of her work include: MAXXI, Italy; Serpentine Gallery, UK and an evening dedicated to her work at Tate Britain, UK; and Moderna Museet, Sweden.
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