Botanical history—and, all right, Wikipedia—posits that Christopher Columbus brought back the first pineapples to Spain from their native South America, “thus making the pineapple the first bromeliad to be introduced by humans outside of the New World”. The global cultivation, and symbolic importance, of the ananas comosus is the subject of a summer exhibition opening today at London’s Tiwani Contemporary gallery (8 July-13 August). The Pineapple Show promises to “mine, expose and invent new narratives around the pineapple. It will explore the fruit’s many histories as well as its cultural, emotional and psychic resonances, taking on issues of labour and luxury, power and powerlessness, vulnerability and violence, language, gender, hair, memory and otherness: all issues that have emerged from meditations on this fruit and are expressed through the bodies and practices of the artists involved.” Most of the artists featured in the show—Jowhor Ile, Odili Donald Odita, Perrin Oglafa, Temitayo Ogunbiyi, Zina Saro-Wiwa, and Johnson Uwadinma—hail from Nigeria, with a handful of other international names such as Elizabeth Colomba, Ian Deleón, and Ayana Evans. The show was curated by Zina Saro-Wiwa (her gallery in Port Harcourt, Nigeria—Boys' Quarters Project Space—is behind the fruity show).
