Creative motivation can be mysterious. Who knows exactly why most artists embrace a medium, a metaphor or an image and pour their lives into it?

But for the artist Zina Saro-Wiwa, the wellspring of her art is brutally straightforward: Her father, the Nigerian writer and anti-oil activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, was executed in 1995 by Nigeria’s military dictatorship for his work fighting environmental degradation and corruption in Ogoniland, the home of the country’s Ogoni people.

“I literally didn’t deal with it at first,” said the Brooklyn-based Ms. Saro-Wiwa, seated in her Crown Heights apartment. “I never cried about his death, nothing. I just sort of buried everything. And 10 or 12 years later I realized I had to do something about it. It was sort of bubbling up.”

Eventually it emerged in a way that she couldn’t have predicted. This week at Art Basel Miami Beach, her London gallery, Tiwani Contemporary, will display her video series “Table Manners” in the Nova sector.