September 26–December 19, 2015
Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston
120 Fine Arts Building
Houston, TX 77204-4018
Hours: Tuesday–Saturday 10am–5pm
Zina Saro-Wiwa: Did You Know We Taught Them How to Dance? is the first solo museum presentation of works by British-Nigerian video artist and filmmaker Zina Saro-Wiwa. Featuring video installations, photographs, and a sound installation produced in the Niger Delta region of southeastern Nigeria from 2013 to 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. Saro-Wiwa returned to this contested region—the place of her birth—to tell new stories that reimagine and challenge Western concepts of environmentalism and of the Niger Delta.
Fully inscribed within the Niger Delta while addressing the global circulation of energy capital, Saro-Wiwa develops narrative devices that render environmental and emotional ecosystems inseparable. Her video and photographic works in the exhibition deal with charismatic Christian prayer warriors; folktales concerning Kuru, an intelligent yet treacherous tortoise; karikpo (antelope) masquerade figures asserting playful gymnastic parkour-like performances around decommissioned pipelines or areas where pipelines once existed; and the color red, which represents birth in the artist’s native Ogoniland and symbolizes her own rebirth there.
For more than twenty years, Saro-Wiwa’s family name has stood for environmentalism and protest due to the outspoken activism of her father, the late writer and human rights activist Ken Saro-Wiwa. Recognizing these as contestable terms, the artist locates spirit, emotion and culture at the center of the conversation. Drawing upon social-sculpture practice where other strategies have failed, Saro-Wiwa advances different ways of knowing about the Niger Delta and its global implications while prompting a reconsideration of the parameters of contemporary “Afropolitan” identities—a term coined in 2005 by writer Taiye Selasi to describe the transnational experience of a new generation of globally mobile Africans.
“To this conversation Saro-Wiwa adds new insight: first relocating ‘the rural’ from the discourse of NGOs and aid to the ambit of spiritual self-determination; and second relocating the identity development project from ‘the urban’ to the village—what she terms ‘the psycho-spiritual core’ of African life,” Selasi writes in the exhibition catalog.
A sound installation titled Hubris Room incorporates the artist’s own voice describing the forces that threatened the production of this body of work: “This is what happened to me one night. I felt that I had to kill the apprehension inside me and the spiritual dread…and that is the night I killed my ancestors in order to make anything happen at all. I had to go to the center of my idea of Ogoni, my idea of my people, my idea of myself to kill them all and reinvent.”
Zina Saro-Wiwa: Did You Know We Taught Them How to Dance? is organized by Amy L. Powell, curator of modern and contemporary art at Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and co-produced with Blaffer Art Museum, where the project originated. The presentation at Blaffer Art Museum is made possible through the generous support of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Additional funding was provided by First Take patrons Jereann Chaney, Cullen Geiselman, Heidi and David Gerger, Pablo and Maria Henning, Cecily Horton, Ann Jackson, Kathrine G. McGovern/McGovern Foundation, James A. Prell, and Lea Weingarten. Additional support comes from the Cecil Amelia Blaffer von Furstenberg Endowment for Exhibitions and Program, the Houston Endowment, Inc., the City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance, the Texas Commission on the Arts, the Jo and Jim Furr Exhibition Endowment at Blaffer Art Museum, and The George and Mary Josephine Hamman Foundation.
Press contact: Devon Britt-Darby, T +713 743 9528 / [email protected]
