CURATORIAL PROJECT: THE PINEAPPLE SHOW
In July 2016, Tiwani Contemporary in London presented The Pineapple Show curated by Saro-Wiwa and featuring artists from Nigeria, Kenya, Brazil, the Caribbean and the United States. The exhibition explored the semiotics of the iconic fruit, expanding the narratives surrounding the pineapple, re-casting its mythos through brand new works of art created specially for The Pineapple Show. Issues of labour and luxury, power and powerlessness, flamboyance and humility, femininity and masculinity, pain and masochism, romance, hair and cosmic travel are expressed through this peculiar and powerful fruit.
The pineapple is a celebrated and eulogized fruit. But much of the literature around it is derived from the encounter between Western European colonial powers and the tropics from the 16th century onwards. The Pineapple Show seeks to add to the canon by mining, exposing and proposing new narratives from the perspectives of the tropics or the tropical other. This show is suggest that we dig deeper and that we do not merely accept ideas and meanings from times past, that we continually question and process information.
The Pineapple Show exemplifies Saro-Wiwa’s commitment to re-defining and re-imagining the relationship between self and environment through her Niger-Delta based gallery Boys’ Quarters Project Space. We are grateful for the platform afforded by Tiwani to continue our investigations for a London audience.
The Pineapple Show emerged from a particular obsession with the pineapple on the part of artist-curator Zina Saro-Wiwa: “Over the last three years I have experienced a growing obsession with pineapples. I moved back to Nigeria and the Niger Delta in 2013 and started eating pineapple more simply because they are grown right there and are plentiful. I started to make video work about pineapples a year later and a year after that began the buying of objects that look like pineapples in the manner of a typical antiques collector. Looking back I feel as if eating the fruit so much in Nigeria had started a conversation within me. Almost like eating the fruit was speaking to me from within. When, in an attempt to understand my growing interest, I started to research what the meanings were behind the fruit, I found ideas and imagery that were fascinating but did not feel like the whole story. Indeed most of the literature surrounding pineapples is drawn from the encounter between Western imperial forces and the tropics from the 17th Century onwards. This show is an attempt to expand and expose newer cultural connections to the pineapple. To hear what it had to say to through myself and other artists.”
