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Zina Saro-Wiwa aka. SIRA* Artist Profile

This bio was originally published on Girlie Action


“All I want to do is talk about the apocalypse,” Zina Saro-Wiwa says, grinning from cheek to cheek. “If you’re talking to me at a party, before too long, that’s where we’ll end up.”


The Nigerian-born international artist doesn’t waste much energy lamenting the End Times, especially since it’s a recurring theme in her life. It comes as no surprise, then, that her debut album under the moniker SIRA* is titled Songs For the End of the World. Contrary to its deceptively bleak façade, the project is in fact a celebration of a new phase of her life as she practices creative freedom with a full range of motion.



Birthed by the passing of her mother in 2022, this new phase and the process through which said bundle of songs were conceived kept Zina from taking her own life in the aftermath of what has been the biggest blow to her emotional buoyancy. In her decade-plus run as a creator, she has taken on a wide range of mediums, from video, photography and sound to food, performance lecture and institution-building — shifting her focus to music and its adjoining crafts, particularly dance, has added yet another layer of coating to a dense portfolio that continues to transcend classification.


Committed to untangling herself from the constraints of expressive discipline, Zina has purposeful disruption deeply ingrained in her genes. This trait, which also happens to be her greatest asset, most notably traces back to her father and environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was executed by the Nigerian government in 1995 for his unwavering pushback against global oil exploits on their native land. Accordingly, a protectiveness of life and the soil that harbors it has been consistent in her work across varying configurations over the years. Inventive or educational, her output remains firm on consciousness, cosmology and ecology through meditation, Deep Listening and a “righteous anger” stemming from profound loss.


Having lost both parents as well as three siblings by her mid-40s, Zina and her twin sister Noo are the remaining two members of a family that once consisted of seven. However, it was the matriarch’s departure that hit her the hardest.


“My mother was my home,” she explains, emphasizing how necessary it is for her to seek out that same sense of belonging through her music moving forward.


The search for a place to call her own has been a constant in Zina’s life from the very beginning. Born in Port Harcourt and raised in the United Kingdom since the age of one, she has lived in Brooklyn and then Los Angeles over the past 15 years. Within that blend, Brazilian music and culture have also played a crucial part in molding her spirit ever since she visited the country in her late teens.


In 2024, she decided to wrap up her time in Southern California and return to her place of birth in the Niger Delta, where she previously lived for approximately three years, from 2013–16 — her longest stint there. Having developed a strong sense of empathy for indigeneity through her interactions with Ogoni culture (the ethnic group her family belongs to) amid a Western upbringing, she feels most comfortable identifying as British-Nigerian even though she came into her own as an artist in the United States.


Prior to her career as a full-time creative, Zina earned a bachelor’s degree in Economic and Social History from Bristol University. Upon graduation, she began working for the BBC as a freelance producer, presenter and reporter into her early 30s, before assuming the role she is now best known for: a shapeshifting innovator with all her fingers on the pulse of the universe.


Over her still-young term, she has accumulated countless accolades that speak to her impact on the art circuit. Since pivoting professions in 2010, she has been named one of Foreign Policy magazine’s Global Thinkers and an Artist-In-Residence at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute in addition to being awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship for Fine Arts plus the TORCH Fellowship at Oxford University. As a James S. Coleman Memorial Lecturer at the University of California Los Angeles in 2020, she put together a widely lauded presentation on African masks and figurines in the form of a film titled Worrying The Mask: The Politics of Authenticity and Contemporaneity in the Worlds of African Art.


Zina’s work has been displayed across the world at noteworthy events and venues such as the Tate Modern, Tate Britain, Yale, Basel Art Fairs, Frieze London, Seattle Art Museum, The Menil, Brooklyn Museum, Guggenheim Bilbao, São Paulo Biennale, Kochi Biennale and Times Square in Manhattan, among many others. Her videos and photographic works can be found in the collections of New York City’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Washington DC’s Smithsonian Museum of African Art, Oxford University’s Pitt Rivers Museum and Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts. 


As for her philanthropic endeavors, she founded the Mangrove Arts Foundation to ensure her father’s conservationist efforts in the oil-cursed Niger Delta region he sacrificed his life for are honored and, crucially, rooted in culture and deep research as the methodology for renewal and repair. Aside from art, culture, food and agricultural drives, the organization is energized by a radical think tank led by Zina called the Illicit Gin Institute.


Today, with her credibility high up in the stratosphere, she is primarily concerned with working through a looming “personal apocalypse” and remedying her soul through music. While still working on her first-ever feature film, Eucharia, Zina is getting more and more comfortable in her transition to SIRA* — the version of herself that thrives in the recording booth, enhancing audio files with visual additives to holistically illustrate the inner workings of a busy mind devoted to healing. 


“I just want to be fulfilled creatively and talk about what I want to talk about in whatever medium I choose,” she says about her present-day outlook. “But right now, music has become my home.”

 

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