Join us on December 3rd, 2022 at 7PM for the screening of Archival Mappings, Three by Onyeka Igwe, followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker in person.

Onyeka Igwe manipulates found footage, sounds & other archival material – questioning the colonial gaze and reasserting the agency of the colonized. She uncovers the material & metaphoric remnants of the British colonial regime in all its ugliness, but also beautifully recollects personal and collective memories from multiple visual and narrative fronts.

Program:

• Specialised Technique (2018)

• The names have changed, including my own and truths have been altered (2019)

• A so-called archive (2020)

Location: Treehouse, Lagos. Awolowo Road behind Spar/YMCA Bldg. Unit 1, 7th Floor, Ikoyi. Enter behind bldg.

Onyeka Igwe is an artist and researcher born and based in London, UK, working between cinema, non-fiction video work and installation. She uses dance, voice, archive and text to create structural ‘figure-of-eights’, a format that exposes a multiplicity of narratives. The work comprises of untieable strands and threads, anchored by a rhythmic editing style, as well as close attention to the dissonance, reflection and amplification that occurs between image and sound. She is particularly focused on invoking lineages of female ancestors and recovering erased African women’s histories from the colonial archives.

Onyeka’s works have been screened at Camden Arts Centre, Dak’art OFF (Senegal) and Dhaka Art Summit (Bangladesh) and at film festivals internationally including European Media Arts Festival (Germany), London Film Festival, Media City Film Festival (Canada), International Film Festival Rotterdam and the Smithsonian African American film festival (USA). Solo exhibitions include The High Line, (New York), LUX (London) and Jerwood Arts (London).

Specialized technique (Onyeka Igwe, 2018, 6 minutes)

William Sellers and the Colonial Film Unit developed a framework for colonial cinema, this included slow edits, no camera tricks and minimal camera movement. Hundreds of films were created in accordance to this rule set. In an effort to recuperate black dance from this colonial project, Specialised Technique, attempts to transform this material from studied spectacle to livingness.

The names have changed, including my own and truths have been altered (Onyeka Igwe, 2019, 25 minutes)

This is a story of the artist’s grandfather, the story of the ‘land’ and the story of an encounter with Nigeria—retold at a single point in time, in a single place. The artist is trying to tell a truth in as many ways as possible. So the names have changed tell us the same story in four different ways: a folktale of two brothers rendered in the broad, unmodulated strokes of colonial British moving images; a Nollywood TV series, on VHS, based on the first published Igbo novel; a story of the family patriarch, passed down through generations; and the diary entries from the artist’s first solo visit to her family’s hometown.Igwe pushes against the materials of the archive—its distortions, fabrications and embellishments—with her own kind of autofictional response. The artist summons a variety of artistic, literary and personal sources to create a singular biographical document of many strands. the names have changed throws the ordinary and the everyday within the archive into relief by daring to write and re-write the stories of diasporic African life against the grain of colonial history’s master narratives. (Tendai John Mutambu)

A so-called archive (Onyeka Igwe, 2020, 19 minutes)

The work interrogates the decomposing repositories of Empire with a forensic lens. Blending footage shot over the past year in two separate colonial archive buildings—one in Lagos, Nigeria, and the other in Bristol, United Kingdom—this double portrait considers the ‘sonic shadows’ that colonial images continue to generate, despite the disintegration of their memory and their materials. Igwe’s film imagines what might have been ‘lost’ from these archives, mixing genres of the radio play, the corporate video tour, and detective noir with a haunting and critical approach to the horror of discovery.In Lagos, the former Nigerian Film Unit was one of the first self-directed outposts of the British visual propaganda engine, the Colonial Film Unit (1932-1955). A So-Called Archive documents a building largely emptied of its contents, finding desolate rooms full of dust, cobwebs, stopped clocks, and rusty and rotting celluloid film cans. The materials found in this building are hard to see, not only because of their condition, but also perhaps because people do not want to see them.Meanwhile, in Bristol Temple Meads, the former British Empire and Commonwealth Museum (2002-2009) was previously housed in the vaults of one Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s most famous railway designs. The museum included photography, film, sound and object collections from across the former British Empire. Like the Nigerian Film Unit building, this building too has been emptied of its content; the museum closed shortly after reported allegations of the illegal sale of several items from its collection. A So-Called Archive depicts these former archives—along with their histories of hoarding, monetisation, documentation and now abandonment—as metonyms for the enduring entanglements between the UK and its former colonies. They were and continue to be home purulent images that we cannot, will not, or choose not to see. (Mason Leaver-Yap)