Pitt Rivers Museum Event Wednesday 6 December 2023 - Talk by David Pratten, Associate Professor - Unmasked: Spirit in the City

You are all invited to the next Members of the Pitt Rivers event, a collaboration between Port Harcourt-born British-Nigerian artist Zina Saro-Wiwa and Oxford anthropologist David Pratten, UNMASKED: Spirit in the City tells the stories behind a modern urban masquerade called Agaba. The storytelling employed in this exhibition weaves art and anthropology, creating an expansive visual language that exposes the vitality and vulnerability of life in modern day oil-producing Port Harcourt in the Niger Delta - life which has been impacted deeply, and often traumatically by the international oil and gas industry. Unmasked takes us through the glass vitrine to expose the beating heart of the humanity that created the mask and shows the secrets of masquerade are not essential and esoteric but elusive and every day.

In this members talk, David Pratten, Associate Professor in the Social Anthropology of Africa, University of Oxford, and Zena McGreevy, Exhibitions Officer at Pitt Rivers Museum, talk about working with artist Zina Saro-Wiwa to co-produce this dramatically different exhibition and installation.

Wednesday 6 December 2023, refreshments from 6pm with the talk starting at 6.30pm at the Pitt Rivers Museum (Robinson Close entrance).