MANGROVE ARTS RESTITUTION INITIATIVE

Ogoni traditional art is singular and finds its way into prominent museum collections around the world. But the potent masks and figurines are a dying art and little is being done to document, protect or promote the practice. Since 2013, Mangrove Arts Foundation founder Zina Saro-Wiwa has been conducting research and documenting Ogoni traditional art and making art work in response to it. She has also been acquiring and commissioning works from standout Ogoni artists:

“In 2013 I returned to the Niger Delta to make art and through art get to grips with my birthplace and personal history. One of the great revelations of my time there was the traditional art making in the villages of Ogoniland. I travelled around the 1000 sq km of my ancestral homeland to find out who all the carvers were and understand masquerade traditions. It was through this journey that I met carvers whose works I loved including Promise Lagiri and Lenu Naabigwa. But this journey also opened my eyes to the ways in which we could be using our cultural power to support our development goals. We are better known for oil and its despoilment but our art is an under-utilised cultural and economic resource and a dying practise in many parts of the Niger Delta. It needs to be protected.

This work is an integral part of the current call for the restitution of African art objects according to Saro-Wiwa:

“When we talk about the restitution of African art objects from European museums, we shouldn’t just be talking about returning works from the West to their respective nations. Our focus should equally be about the restitution of objects and cultures within the continent. Restitution also means documenting, honouring and developing the contemporary traditional arts practises that persist in Africa and certainly in the Niger Delta. This is an art practise that is suffering from philosophically and economically dubious international art world practises, as well as local prejudices and corruption.”

The solution offered by the Mangrove Arts Foundation is to discover and develop relationships with the most active carvers, streamline their international sales from an official Mangrove Arts Foundation collection ensuring that for international buyers the artist is credited, certificates of authenticity established and value determined by the African creative body. We collect their works and display, lecture and fund apprenticeships and manage and streamline international sales. There are also many works that are in the possession of people that go back over a hundred years and this project documents the style and usages of these masks. This new living archive forms the basis of new books and exhibits providing local and international educational resources, preserving the region’s cultural capital.