Onyeka Igwe is an artist and researcher working between cinema and installation. She is born and based in London, UK. Through her work, Onyeka is animated by the question — how do we live together? — with particular interest in the ways bodies, architecture and non-canonical ways of being and knowing can provide answers. She uses embodiment, voice, archives, narration and text to create structural ‘figure-of-eights’, a format that exposes a multiplicity of narratives. 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.
Onyeka is part of B.O.S.S., a sound system collective that brings together a community of queer, trans and non binary people of colour involved in art, sound and radical activism. Together with Rachael Rakes and Laura Huertas Millán, she is part of a curatorial and research initiative, Counter-Encounters, thinking on alternative and anti ethnographies.
Onyeka’s video works have been screened at Artists’ Film Club: Black Radical Imagination, ICA, London, 2017; Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh, 2020, and at film festivals internationally including the London Film Festival, 2015; Rotterdam International, Netherlands, 2018, 2019 and 2020; Edinburgh Artist Moving Image, 2016; Images Festival, Canada, 2019, and the Smithsonian African American film festival, USA, 2018.
Solo projects include Corrections, with Aliya Pabani, Trinity Square Video, Toronto, Canada, 2018, and There Were Two Brothers, Jerwood Arts, 2019.
Recent group projects include Reconfigured, Timothy Taylor New York, USA, KW Production Series, Berlin, Germany, 2020, [POST] Colonial Bodies 2, CC Matienzo, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2019, there’s something in the conversation that is more interesting than the finality of (a title), The Showroom, London, UK, 2018 and World Cup!, articule, Montreal, Canada, 2018.
Forthcoming solo exhibitions include The story is what’s in that room, Mercer Union, Toronto, Canada and a so-called archive, LUX, London, UK, all 2021.
She was awarded the 2020 Arts Foundation Futures Award for Experimental Short Film and was the recipient of the Berwick New Cinema Award in 2019.
