Onyeka Igwe
ARTISTS TO WATCH (a2w)
Each month we invite a member of the She Performs community to share their Artists to Watch - a personal selection of three artists whose work has caught their attention. This month’s a2w have been chosen by Marita Fraser. Published over three consecutive days, the second of Marita’s three a2w is Onyeka Igwe …
Her name in My Mouth
HD Video
1920 x 1080
Photo credit: Courtesy of the artist
Onyeka Igwe
Onyeka Igwe is a British artist and researcher working between film and installation. Igwe describes her moving image work as non-fiction, using dance, archives, text and voice to examine the cultural and political production of geographical places and bodies. She draws on her family histories to examine West African and Nigerian colonial histories. Her research examines how archives reproduce particular ways of being, with a specific interest in how the British colonial project is manifest within archives.
Igwe uses, what she terms, critical proximity, being a coming close with her body and others, to the body of the archive through touch, dance, text, projection and readings; examining through this closeness the cultural production of the colonial imagination. Her moving image works consciously present a lack of knowledge hierarchies. She presents archival film from her family alongside colonial ethnographic film, re-filming these images whilst performing to camera, dancing, speaking, subtitling, creating double/multiple projections of the body in motion across time. We need New Names, (2015) is an examination of contemporary Nigerian diaspora and female identity. In this work Igwe reads a colonial record of an ethnographers encounter with West African women and subtitles a film of the funeral of her Nigerian family’s matriarch. The work presents contradictions of ethnographic accounts through her subjective experience in thinking through film, storytelling and histories, across geographical spaces and times.
Specialised Technique, (2018) is one of three films from the project No Dance, No Palaver, using the anti-colonial uprising of Aba Women's War in 1929 to examine visual trauma within colonial archives. In Specialised Technique, Igwe reuses historical ethnographic moving image, breaking the archival film with speculative first-person narratives, creating pauses in original footage. These rhythmic textual interruptions offer space for voices to speak across time. Igwe films herself dancing and speaking with, through and alongside the women of the archive, in the present and multiple pasts, offering a multitude of representational views of the production of the body. Her films offering new kinds of figuration, narratives and knowledge to speak with and through archival bodies.
In 2020, Onyeka Igwe will present work at Carbonia Film Festival, Italy; Experimenta, BFI London Film Festival; New Labor Movements, McEvoy Foundation, San Francisco; Brazil African Film Festival; Film Africa, BFI Southbank, London and Interfilm Berlin, Kino in der Königstadt, Berlin.
Specialised Technique
16mm film transferred to video
720 x 576
Photo credit: Courtesy of the artist and the BFI National Archive
the names have changed including my own and truths have been altered
HD Video, 16mm film transferred to video, VHS transferred to video
1920 x 1080
Photo credit: Courtesy of the artist
Marita Fraser is an artist, writer and researcher exhibiting internationally, including exhibitions with Kunsthaus Vienna, Städtisches Museum Engen, Atelierhaus Salzamt Linz, Kunstverein Wilhelmshöhe Ettlingen, MU Eindhoven and Perth Institute of Contemporary Art. In 2016 she was awarded the ArtReview Casa Wabi Residency Award and was resident at Museums Quartier Vienna (Q21). She is a PhD candidate at the Royal College of Art supported by an AHRC/TECHNE doctoral award.
If you would like to contribute your Artists to Watch, please get in touch: contact@sheperforms.com.
