Onyeka Igwe Read Bio Collapse
Onyeka Igwe is a London-born and -based moving-image 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. She is interested in the prosaic and everyday aspects of black livingness. 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. Onyeka’s video works have been screened at Modern Mondays, MoMA, New York; Artists’ Film Club: Black Radical Imagination, ICA, London; and Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh; and at film festivals internationally including the London Film Festival; Open City Documentary Film Festival, Rotterdam International; Edinburgh Artist Moving Image; Images Festival; and the Smithsonian African American film festival. Her solo exhibitions include A Repertoire of Protest (No Dance, No Palaver), MoMA PS1, New York, 2023; The Miracle on George Green, The High Line, New York, 2022; a so-called archive, LUX, London, 2021; THE REAL STORY IS WHAT’S IN THAT ROOM, Mercer Union, Toronto, 2021; There Were Two Brothers, Jerwood Arts, London, 2019; Corrections, with Aliya Pabani, Trinity Square Video, Toronto, 2018; and upcoming at The Bonington Gallery, Nottingham, in January 2024. She is a recipient of the 2021 Foundwork Artist Prize, 2020 Arts Foundation Futures Award for Experimental Short Film, and the 2019 Berwick New Cinema Award.