Zina Saro-Wiwa

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.

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 piece. She also participates in the forthcoming Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2020) and São Paulo Biennial (2021).

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.