Professor Becker Hosts Performance-Lecture by Artist Zina Saro-Wiwa
Women and Masks Conference at BU Presents:
Worrying the Mask – The Politics of Authenticity and Contemporaneity in the Worlds of African Art
February 11, 2022
7 pm EST
Performance-Lecture
by Zina Saro-Wiwa
In this unique performance lecture film, artist Zina Saro-Wiwa navigates the moral, philosophical and cultural conundrums that arise from the very existence of contemporary traditional African art. The likes of which she encounters, exhibits and entangles with in her native Ogoniland. Saro-Wiwa’s hybrid identity has forced her to consider how African masks live both in the West and in Africa and how these African art worlds impact one another and explores the ways in which the cultural capital-building powers of traditional African art objects are curtailed. In “Worrying the Mask” Saro-Wiwa challenges the call for the restitution of African art by privileging storytelling over geographical location. She exposes the desires and limitations of Ogoni storytelling to ask whether an object can represent a people at all. And she elucidates how contemporaneity informs the genre of “contemporary traditional African art,” suggesting that our attempts to understand and explain it may require a radical ontological shift.From: https://mangroveartsfoundation.org/Worrying-The-Mask-new-lecture-film-by-Zina-Saro-WiwaThis event is hosted by Dr. Cynthia Becker, Associate Professor in the History of Art & Architecture Department at Boston University, specializing in African and African diaspora art.
To register for this and other February events, please go to https://sites.bu.edu/womenandmasks/events/february-11-13th/. Visit https://sites.bu.edu/womenandmasks/ for more information about the conference.