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This program is postponed due to unforeseen circumstances.
A new date and time will be scheduled and shared as soon as possible.

Join us at The Screening Room for a special screening of Zina Saro-Wiwa’s video-performance Worrying the Mask: The Politics of Authenticity and Contemporaneity in the Worlds of African Art (2020). Following the screening, Saro-Wiwa takes to the stage with Dr Qanita Lilla, Associate Curator, Arts of Africa for a discussion and Q & A.

In Worrying the Mask (2020), Zina Saro-Wiwa questions the authority of the museum and its outmoded colonial practices and shifts the restitution debate into genuinely radical new territory. She exposes the desires and limitations of the storytelling surrounding African traditional objects whether in the country of origin or in the country of display and goes on to ask whether an African object can represent a people at all or if they, in fact, have a life of their own. She suggests that our attempts to understand, explain and truly benefit from these works as a society may require a fundamental ontological shift.

Biography

Artist Zina Saro-Wiwa (b. 1976, Port Harcourt, Nigeria) lives and works between Los Angeles and Port Harcourt, Nigeria. In April 2017, Saro-Wiwa was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for Fine Arts. She has given talks and shown works regularly at biennales, museums and art fairs around the world including MoMA and Tate Modern.