Onyeka Igwe

Onyeka Igwe

History

Onyeka Igwe is an artist filmmaker, programmer and researcher. She lives and works in London. In her non-fiction video work Onyeka uses dance, voice, archive and text to expose a multiplicity of narratives. The work explores the physical body and geographical place as sites of cultural and political meaning. Her video works have shown at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, Nuit Blanche, Toronto, The Showroom, London, articule, Montreal and Trinity Square Video, Toronto as well as at the London, Edinburgh Artist Moving Image, Rotterdam International and Hamburg film festivals.

Profile

Onyeka Igwe

Movies

Ungentle
Ungentle
Director
A film exploring the complicated relationship between British espionage and male homosexuality.
A So-Called Archive
A So-Called Archive
Sound Recordist
With a forensic lens, Onyeka Igwe's A So-Called Archive interrogate the decomposing repositories of Empire. 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 the memory and their materials. It mixes the genres of the radio play, the corporate video tour and detective noir, with a haunting and critical approach to the horror of discovery.
A So-Called Archive
A So-Called Archive
Director
With a forensic lens, Onyeka Igwe's A So-Called Archive interrogate the decomposing repositories of Empire. 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 the memory and their materials. It mixes the genres of the radio play, the corporate video tour and detective noir, with a haunting and critical approach to the horror of discovery.
No Archive Can Restore You
No Archive Can Restore You
Director
Onyeka Igwe’s No Archive Can Restore You surveys the rustic, decaying interiors of the former Nigerian Film Unit building in Lago, viscerally evoking a history full of contingency – including colonial propaganda, institutional neglect, architectural rot – and reimagining the lost sounds that abandoned film cans may contain.
Collective Hum
Collective Hum
Cinematography
A short film exploring the polyphony of collectivity in the desires, motivations and stories that foreground the histories and present(s) of Black British sound. Collective Hum documents a collective in practice through the operation of B.O.S.S using multiple narration, overlapping voices and the sound of group interviews, meetings and events to create a polyphonic score to soundtrack images of the ‘collective bodies, kinaesthetic experience and gestural language’ of sound system culture.
Collective Hum
Collective Hum
Editor
A short film exploring the polyphony of collectivity in the desires, motivations and stories that foreground the histories and present(s) of Black British sound. Collective Hum documents a collective in practice through the operation of B.O.S.S using multiple narration, overlapping voices and the sound of group interviews, meetings and events to create a polyphonic score to soundtrack images of the ‘collective bodies, kinaesthetic experience and gestural language’ of sound system culture.
The Names Have Changed, Including My Own and Truths Have Been Altered
The Names Have Changed, Including My Own and Truths Have Been Altered
Director
A film telling the same story in four different ways - using British colonial moving images to tell a folk story of two brothers, a VHS Nollywood TV series of the first published Igbo novel, a passed down story of a the family patriarch and the diary entries of the artist's first solo trip to her family's hometown.
Specialised Technique
Specialised Technique
Director
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.
Her Name in My Mouth
Her Name in My Mouth
Director
The film revisions the Aba Women’s War, the first major anti-colonial uprisings in Nigeria, using embodiment, gesture and the archive. The film is structured around the repurposing of archival films from the British propaganda arm cut against a gestural evocation of the women’s testimonies.
Sitting on a Man
Sitting on a Man
Director
Part two of Igwe's trilogy on the 1929 Aba Women's War.
We Need New Names
We Need New Names
Director
A work examining contemporary Nigerian diasporic female identity through the contradictions inherent to an ethnographic reading of the funeral of the filmmakers’ family matriarch. Using personal archive to explore the concepts of female identity, diaspora, cultural memory and most importantly ‘fiction’.