Onyeka Igwe
Directing
Biography
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.
Known For
A fictionalised essay read by Ben Wishaw exploring the complicated relationship between British espionage and male homosexuality. An anonymous narrator talks through the various chapters of his life as a spy and a gay man in late 20th-century Britain. His vivid stories of intimacy and surveillance play out over shots of the luscious countryside, busy Central London streets, and nighttime cruising zones.
Ungentle
Imagining a revolutionary play authored by two female activists in the anti-colonial movement in post-war London.
A Radical Duet
No description available.
Notes on dancing with the archive
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.
No Archive Can Restore You
No description available.
The Miracle on George Green
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
No description available.
Sylvie’s Monologue
Part two of Igwe's trilogy on the 1929 Aba Women's War.
Sitting on a Man
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
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.
Her Name in My Mouth
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’.
We Need New Names
8 yams, 8 small yams, 8 eggs, a cow and a cockerel. 2021. Great Britain. Directed by Onyeka Igwe. 4 min.
8 yams, 8 small yams, 8 eggs, a cow and a cockerel
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.
Specialised Technique
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.
The Names Have Changed, Including My Own and Truths Have Been Altered
Another Step Forward. 2020. Great Britain. Directed by Onyeka Igwe. 6 min.
Another Step Forward
The film explores the University of Ibadan, the oldest degree-awarding institution in Nigeria. Moving through the university’s tropical modernist architecture, the film traces the building’s personal and political histories, from its colonial roots through to national independence, civil war and towards the present day.