BIOGRAPHY
Zina Saro-Wiwa is an artist who lives and works between Los Angeles, the UK and Port Harcourt, Nigeria. Her multi-disciplinary, research-based practice deals primarily with environmentalism, invisible ecologies, re-imagining indigeneity and exploring the nature of power. She works with video, photography, sound, distillation, food, performance lecture and institution-building to tell stories and share research and meditation findings. Saro-Wiwa is a Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Art and will be a TORCH visiting Fellow at Oxford University in Michaelmas Term 2023.
Though her practise, on the surface, appears wide-ranging, the constellation of works and institutions she creates represent a holistic map of profoundly interrelated themes emanating from her ongoing focus and meditation on the Niger Delta where she was born. The rhizomatic nature of her prolific art career is a reflection of her commitment to metabolising and embodying the structures and energetic patterns of the natural world. It is the result of her practise of Deep Listening. And what animates and pulsates through her practise are questions of place and power.
Born in Nigeria and raised since infancy in the United Kingdom, she studied Economic and Social History at Bristol University and she worked freelance as a BBC producer, presenter and reporter for over twelve years. She transitioned into art in 2010. Initially she used art to unpack her responses to her complex family heritage and as her practise deepened, her art became a tool to transform and free her understanding of the environment around us and our place within it. For Saro-Wiwa environmentalism does not only implicate worries about greenhouse emissions and oil pollution, but also emotional landscapes and spiritual ecosystems. She deploys multiple strategies: video installation, photography, movie and documentary making, writing, curatorial projects, institution building and food initiatives to explore her place in the world and to construct a more thorough and integrated concept of environmentalism and ecological truth.
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. She will be a TORCH Fellow at Oxford University in Autumn 2023. She has given lectures and shown works regularly at biennales, museums and art fairs around the world including Tate Modern, Tate Britain, Yale, Art Basel, Basel Miami, Frieze London, Seattle Art Museum, The Menil, Brooklyn Museum, Guggenheim Bilbao, São Paulo Biennale (‘21), Kochi Biennale (‘22) and Times Square in Manhattan. Her work can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Smithsonian Museum of African Art, The Pitt Rivers Museum Oxford and Museum of Fine Arts Houston to name but a few institutions. In 2020 she was the James S. Coleman Memorial Lecturer at UCLA and delivered a highly-acclaimed lecture about the restitution of African masks and figurines. Her lecture was delivered as a (now-collectible and collected) film titled "Worrying The Mask: The Politics of Authenticity and Contemporaneity in the Worlds of African Art".
She runs her own not-for-profit the Mangrove Arts Foundation which uses art, culture, food and agricultural projects including her Illicit Gin Institute project to transform the fate of the oil-cursed Niger Delta. She is also working on her first ever feature film titled Eucharia.
