TABLE MANNERS
Seasons 1 & 2 (2014-2019)

One of Saro-Wiwa’s best known and best loved works, recently acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York and shown in Times Square as the Midnight Moment in November 2020, Table Manners is a series of works that depicts selected individuals eating dishes. In this work Zina taps into the subcutaneous layer of Niger Delta life where the engagement with nature’s bounty is presented joyfully and unapologetically. There are 16 videos in all, 8 in Season 1 which was made between 2014 and 2016, and 8 videos in Season 2 which was made in 2019. Editioned prints of the video are available. View here:

In Table Manners a person is shown seated at a table. The backdrop is constructed from what is found locally at the moment the filming is taking place. The subject begins to eat the meal in front of them until he or she has consumed the dish – all the while looking directly into the camera and ultimately the viewer, who becomes, in effect, a dining partner. Each work is titled after the name of the performer and the food eaten. The place the meal was consumed is stated at the end also forcing the viewer to consume the language of the site.

Table Manners alludes playfully to the historical colonial disregard for local eating practices but its subjects refuse voyeuristic impulses as they gaze back, unphased, at the viewer, consuming and ultimately finishing their meal on their own terms. Sustained by their land. Straddling performance and documentary the work invites the viewers prejudices, desires, disdain, humour, discomfort and pleasure but very much reflects it back onto the viewer who is the author of the work. The subjects in Table Manners are simply eating their food.

For Saro-Wiwa, Table Manners is about place and power. These eating performances are acts of insistence and self-determination which re-inscribe and re-insinuate the subject back into a landscape that is very much theirs, despite repeated and often catastrophic intervention from outside forces.