Zina Saro-Wiwa

Zina Saro-Wiwa (born 1976, Port Harcourt, Nigeria) is a Brooklyn-based video artist and filmmaker.

Quotes

• Assemblies are portals where...flora is alive. I am introducing a West African cultural approach to alcohol consumption which is ritual, medicinal, mindful and moderate. My Assemblies are an opportunity to explore the very idea of ‘spirit’. The history of distilled spirits is alchemical and to me occupies a very powerful nexus at which spirituality and science meet...And the events do feel spiritual but they’re also very warm, rigorous and engaging. It is social medicine.
  • Artist-in-residence Zina Saro-Wiwa, e-flux, March 30, 2023.
• That’s what it means to be an artist, for me, listening to the land and letting the land tell the stories.
  • Sukanya Deb, Zina Saro-Wiwa’s exhibition depicts performance and complexity in a story of oil, Stir World, February 16, 2023.
• The fact that (the mask) was heavy was important — I saw information in that. This idea that, here is this material that’s petroleum-based, and I liked the poetry of how it has kind of prevented performance, but that they also look sugary. But the cost is so much more (than the traditional wooden masks). And they also make beautiful pictures quite frankly!
  • Sukanya Deb, Zina Saro-Wiwa’s exhibition depicts performance and complexity in a story of oil, Stir World, February 16, 2023.
• It's beholden upon storytellers, whether they are in the media or museum world, to tell deeper stories and to provide a point of connection, and that kind of hasn't really been happening. That’s because you need contemporary artists to go there and (for the institution to) be comfortable with a certain level of subjectivity.
  • Sukanya Deb, Zina Saro-Wiwa’s exhibition depicts performance and complexity in a story of oil, Stir World, February 16, 2023.
• I do not consider myself an activist and never will. I hope nothing happens to me that forces me to engage on a single issue.
  • Ismail Einashe, ‘It’s Time to Decolonize Environmentalism’: An Interview with Zina Saro-Wiwa, Frieze, September 11, 2018.
• I think regions are strong when they maintain strong cultural ties to their past and thus a powerful sense of self. Cultural power leads to other forms of power. So for me culture comes first, and contemporary art is a tool and strategy to uncover the past and develop cultural capital.
  • Ismail Einashe, ‘It’s Time to Decolonize Environmentalism’: An Interview with Zina Saro-Wiwa, Frieze, September 11, 2018.