Invisible Man: The Weight of Absence

The Invisible Man is a series of works made between 2014 and 2016 in Ogoniland, Zina Saro-Wiwa’s ancestral homeland and the site of one of the most catastrophic international clashes between Big Oil and indigenous farmers. Her father, writer and Nobel Nominee Ken Saro-Wiwa, was murdered by the Nigeria government for his peaceful campaigning against Shell Oil’s pollution of the beautiful farming Eden that is Ogoniland. Saro-Wiwa decided in 2013 to return to Ogoniland to make work about the region which she saw being murdered all over again with the storytelling that emerged from the troubled region that focused on and fed the endemic violence that flourished. She knew instinctively that restitution did not lie in simply reporting violent clashes or oil spills, but rather she went to Ogoniland to listen to the land and feed the stories that connected the people to their environment and celebrated their way of life.