Onyeka Igwe is an artist and researcher. Her work is aimed at the question: how do we live together? Not to provide a rigid answer as such, but to pull apart the nuances of mutuality and co-existence in our deeply individualized world. Onyeka’s practice figures sensorial, spatial and counter-hegemonic ways of knowing as central to that task. For her, the body, archives and narratives both oral and textual act as a mode of enquiry that makes possible the exposition of overlooked histories . The work comprises untying 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. Her films addresses colonial issues of archiving and what forms of knowledge processes of archiving reproduce as well what has been lost in the archive. She attempts to rally other forms of knowledge in order to challenge the orthodoxy of history. Onyeka will present some works and discuss the experimentation in her practice.

Onyeka Igwe is a London born, and based, moving image artist, researcher and Senior tutor at Ruskin Arts School, University of Oxford. Her works have been shown in the UK and internationally at film festivals and galleries and she will participate in the group show ‘Nigeria Imaginary’ in the national pavilion of Nigeria at the upcoming 60th Venice Biennial in 2024.

The talk is moderated by Daniel Horn (Freie Universität Berlin). It is organized by research project C06 and part of the laboratory format Intervention Space Art and Academia.