Onyeka Igwe is a London born and based moving image artist and researcher working across cinema and installation. Her practice offers a focus upon sites and situations in the UK and Nigeria, interweaving oral histories, government records, gesture, dance, and song – to surface obscured or marginalised histories. Through an engagement with spatial and embodied forms of knowledge, Igwe explores alternative ways of understanding the past and what this might mean for the present.
Central to much of her work is a challenge to the practices of British colonialism in West Africa. Drawing on the residues of colonial archives and protest movements, her work foregrounds collective memory and lived experience. Re-found and re-positioned, historical materials are activated through filmic interventions that allow for new narratives to develop. Sound and rhythm are used as critical tools to interrupt landscapes and architecture. The resulting films and installations are layered and offer poly-situated and sensorial understandings of space and place. As Yasmina Price writes, “Igwe does not look at the archive, she sways and speaks with it, resurrecting what has long been sealed away in forgotten documents and dusty storage rooms.”
Igwe’s video works have been screened at Modern Mondays, MoMA; Artists’ Film Club: Black Radical Imagination, ICA, London, 2017; Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh, 2020; and at film festivals internationally including the BFI London Film Festival in 2015 and 2020; Open City Documentary Film Festival 2021 and 2022; Rotterdam International, Netherlands 2018, 2019 and 2020; Edinburgh Artist Moving Image 2016; Images Festival 2019, and the Smithsonian African American film festival 2018.
In Focus: Onyeka Igwe presents a selection of moving-image works produced between 2015 and 2025, alongside a curated programme of artist films and videos made for British television, as well as a participatory performance workshop.
In Focus: Onyeka Igwe
By Kari Rittenbach
Watching those films had squashed me a little – into the 4:3 box of the images, and into the fixity of their meaning. [I] wanted to dance.
I. Light-writing, proto-cinema
In fin-de-siècle France, dance entered into early cinematographic experiments as an organic art of dynamic motion and a popular entertainment. Loïe Fuller’s enigmatic Serpentine Dance astonished the Symbolists – a “theatrical form of poetry par excellence,” noted Mallarmé—and survives as an evocative mechanical technique that presaged modernism, stunningly conveyed through photography and film, including by the Lumière Company in 1897. After a New York City debut, Fuller performed her danses lumineuses three hundred consecutive nights at the Folies-Bergère in Paris. Arrayed in white silk yardage boned along the hemline and gathered at the neck, she threw grandiose billowing shapes above the proscenium. Under the glow of magic lanterns with tinted gels, Fuller’s lofted fabric transformed both dance and dancer into a scrim of continuously transforming colour. To register these effects, each frame of the Lumière film strip was meticulously hand-coloured. Fuller enlisted prostheses and scientific technology to heighten the drama of a low and often provocative vaudeville form – the skirt dance – into a heady and non-representational meditation on metamorphosis. Describing Fuller’s influence more than one century later, Ann Cooper Albright connected her Serpentine choreography to analogous aims of postmodern dance, based on structured improvisations intended to “mobilise space” in the abstract.
Adapted, cropped, annotated, and/or overcranked from filmstock sourced through newsreels including Pathé and the British government’s Colonial Film Unit, Onyeka Igwe’s Specialised Technique (2019) includes found dance-like material recorded in Nigeria, Sudan, and Tanzania between 1930 and 1956. In one brief scene, the anthropological purview of the camera is focused on the swaying torso of a woman, eyes downcast and a band of white cloth tethered to her hips. She loosely swings each wide swathe up, higher and higher on either side of her shoulders, an action at first visible around the outer edge of the frame into which it steadily encroaches as she repeats the gesture, until each band almost functions as pure negative space on the surface of the high-contrast black-and-white film. When the camera angle unexpectedly shifts, the dancer falls into a coordinated line with at least four other women, connected to and manipulating the same expanse of white fabric, at a frame rate decelerated by Igwe to emphasize the voluminous and vigorous flowing line. The women arrange themselves in single file, beyond and behind which even more dancers are positioned, facing opposite directions, although the strict angle of the static camera prevents the encompassing shape and overall group formation from being observed. Igwe’s film, part of her early cycle No Dance, No Palaver (2017-2023), recirculates moving image evidence of dance not intentionally captured or even viewed as such, and thus establishes a methodology of tracing and refracting the “mobilised space” of action – the radiant energies of nascent political and social formations – through the sensorial framework of cinema.
II. What is a document?
Igwe’s right hand follows the neat entries of an index to a bound, typewritten report in Her Name in My Mouth (2017) – pausing briefly to unfold inserted maps of Aba and Opobo in Southeastern Nigeria – as her camera lens pulses through, then blurs over the dry language of official testimony summarizing a woman-led, anti-colonial uprising. The film tracks through hand-scripted amendments and assertions, lingering over stamps, signatures, and other markers of bureaucratic handling. Suddenly her mother’s voice cuts through the hermetic silence of the tabletop library setting. The melodic intonation of Igbo phrases – recalled from the cultural practice of public verbal shaming later termed “sitting on a man” – repeats and transforms others perhaps cited in the formal findings. Beyond destabilizing a straight reading of this primary British colonial text, Igwe’s film introduces found footage from the region in roughly the same era to better picture its maligned subjects, along with traditional textiles of various kinds: lilac stitched with a fine golden thread, a wax-print with teal and burgundy geometries. Igwe activates touch and tone to complicate the ways in which events, parables, and histories are remembered – a practice she refers to as “telling a truth in as many ways as possible.” Counter to the closed record, she finds documentary forms that are far more textured and even diffuse; such as the ritual score in 8 yams, 8 small yams, 8 eggs, a cow and a cockerel (2021) which is also a recipe for reconciliation, and the screens of prefabricated cement at the University of Ibadan (Penkelemes, 2025) that filter sunlight, fulfil a modernist ideology, and function as ciphers for students of the post-independence period. These spatial and material containers for memory contrast the cobwebbed and rotting canisters of film stacked throughout the abandoned Nigerian Film Corporation building in Lagos (No archive can restore you, 2020), promising an ignominious end for the filmmaker’s efforts.
III. Dancing with the Dead
If Maya Deren’s unfinished Divine Horsemen (filmed 1947-54), and Katherine Dunham’s pioneering modern dance technique engage the afterlives of Voodoo loa – specifically, their vital motion by way of mortal possession – in cinematography and choreography, respectively, both studies might be said to concern dancing with the dead. Whereas Hans Holbein’s Totentanz (1523-25) construes this deliriously inevitable procession towards the grave, Deren and Dunham examine the phenomenon as it erupts in daily life, through ceremony and through poly-movement structures. Igwe’s first encounter with the genre, for her purported grandmother’s 103rd celebration of life, examines her own diasporic view of the family funeral rite (We Need New Names, 2015), as six pallbearers in white suits do a quick two-step while each holding her coffin aloft on a single arm, extended. An early and brief experiment with the essay film form, Igwe’s conflicted feelings, personal voice, and probing intertitles, mixed with various info captioned in her found footage were influential for her now characteristic multi-channel narrative structures expressed via superscript, non-linguistic notation (Notes on dancing with the archive, 2023), and sampled audio that seem to unravel and undo as much as they tell.
IV. An Ending
Midway through A Radical Duet (2025), the film’s loose narrative of historical reenactment breaks down as the actors enter (retroactively) into a pre-shoot workshop with the director. Igwe invites them to read and reflect on her research and archival materials for the film’s main characters and their likely motivations in the period under review. She quotes novelist and essayist Sylvia Wynter on the potentiality of theatre as a means for rehearsing society, or “practicing a new world through play” before the cast give lines, table read, and discuss their personal connections to revolutionary theatre, and one another. In the final scene, Igwe introduces the prompt for the workshop, which is to, in fact, write the play named in the film’s title: an imagined collaboration between Wynter and activist Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti who each passed through London in 1947. Expanding this speculatively shared authorship to include her actors and indeed even the audience of viewers, Igwe displaces the crisis of the film’s action beyond the limits of her own drama, pushing its potentiality onto the “mobilised space” of the world outside cinema – inventing a document for a new era.
Kari Rittenbach is a critic and curator based in New York. She works at MoMA PS1 and is a visiting critic at the Yale School of Art.