Zina Saro-Wiwa

About this book

"'Did You Know We Taught Them How To Dance?' is the first solo museum presentation of works by British-Nigerian video artist and filmkaker Zina Saro-Wiwa. Featuring video installations, photographs, and a sound installation produced in the Niger Delta region of southeastern Nigeria from 2013-2015, the exhibition uses folklore, masquerade traditions, religious practices, food and Nigerian popular aesthetics to test art's capacity to transform and to envision new concepts of environment and environmentalism. Engaging Niger Delta residents both as subjects and collaborators, Zina Saro-Wiwa cultivates strategies of psychic survival and performance, underscoring the complex and expressive ways in which people live in an area historically fraught with the politics of energy, labor and land. Known for decades for corruption and envrionmental degradation, the Niger Delta is also a verdant place, an abundant food producer as well as provider of crude oil and natural gas to the entire globe. Full inscribed within the Niger Delta while addressing the global circulation ofenergy capital, Saro-Wiwa develops narraitve devices that render environmental and emotional ecosystems inseparable."