Onyeka Igwe

Onyeka Igwe’s practice destabilizes the colonial archive, which for her appears not as a stable repository of knowledge, but as a site full of tensions, opacities, and never-processed violence. Her films and installations confront the archive with what is missing, what has been suppressed or rendered inaudible. Igwe breathes new life into materials often treated as lifeless—celluloid reels, photographic documents of past bureaucracies, abandoned and forgotten spaces. What emerges is not a reconstruction of history, but an attunement to its dissonances: a sensually experienceable historiography in which colonial violence is not a thing of the past but profoundly shapes the present.

Upstairs, two video works—both part of No Archive Can Restore this Chorus of (Diasporic) Shame (2024/26)—unfold in close relationship to each other. The moving image presented at the window front integrates into the institution’s architecture and the urban environment, thus situating its sound and image field within the specific conditions of its presentation. The film traces the aftermath of British colonialism in Nigeria through the abandoned premises of the former Nigerian Film Unit in Lagos—once an important branch of the Colonial Film Unit’s propaganda apparatus. The building is now dilapidated. The footage stored there is difficult to access—not only due to its material deterioration, but also because of a general reluctance to engage with its contents.

Instead of restoring these lost or inaccessible films, Igwe approaches them indirectly. The video captures the building’s interiors in tranquil images—spaces full of dust, cobwebs, and decaying files and film canisters. The archive thus becomes visible as both materially present and withdrawn. A lightbox installation titled anomalies and cobwebs (2026) displays slides taken from the film and reassembled years later. Detached from their original sequence and presented as individual images, these fragments demonstrate that Igwe’s own film can also be reassembled and rewritten over time.

When the first video ends, a dense soundscape unfolds. When Igwe presented the work at the Nigerian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2024, the soundtrack was accompanied by a black screen. For the exhibition at the Secession, the artist developed a second, digitally generated video work that adds a visual layer to the composition. It shows an animated spatial reconstruction of the abandoned Nigerian Film Unit building—exterior and interior—and conveys the different sound levels in the form of integrated subtitles. For several years, Igwe has been exploring how film and sound can be made accessible to deaf people. The subtitles here do not merely describe the audible. They translate the soundscape into a visual form and become a central pictorial element of the work.

The soundscape consists of witness statements, field recordings, and archival fragments collected in various locations in Nigeria and the United Kingdom. The work takes Nnamdi Azikiwe’s inaugural address—a leading figure of the anti-colonial movement and Nigeria’s first president in 1963—as a moment of utopian promise, while also tracing stories of protest, conflict, and resistance from colonial rule to the present day.

A core component of the sound are songs linked to the Egba Women’s Uprising of 1947—a protest against the colonial tax system led by the Abeokuta Women’s Union under Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti. Igwe stumbled upon the lyrics during archival research, but recordings of the songs themselves could not be found. The new choral composition, arranged by artist and musician Tanya Auclair and performed by a thirteen-member a cappella ensemble, reinterprets the songs. These are based on the tradition of Sacred Harp singing—a form of a cappella choral music primarily found in the Southern United States. Instead of a single choir director, the singers take turns leading. This creates a collective and ever-evolving form of communal singing. Rather than aiming for unanimity, the cacophonous composition embraces plurality. It forms a counterpoint to Western-dominated portrayals of Nigeria and instead articulates a polyphonic, resistant mode of remembrance and speculative thinking that shatters the visual regime of the archive.

The film’s title was inspired by Julietta Singh’s book No Archive Will Restore You (2018), a hybrid of essay, memoir, and poetic theory that radically rethinks the archive—not as a collection of documents, but as something inscribed in and through the body. The title is programmatic: no archive, institutional or otherwise, can restore what has been lost. Instead of promising recuperation or coherence, Singh foregrounds rupture, opacity, and the persistence of what resists reading. The same attitude resonates in Igwe’s work as she emphasizes the limits of restoring the archived and the impossibility of fully recovering what has been erased or denied. Instead, the film evokes what might be understood as the “acoustic shadows” (Alexander Ghedi Weheliye) of colonial moving images.

In all her works, Igwe stages the encounter with the archive as a space of unease, where knowledge remains unstable and relational, felt rather than secured. Her installation makes the affective and spatial architectures of imperial power perceptible while also pointing to their decline. She undermines the supposed immutability of historical narratives and opens a space for speculation and forms of witness that are not based on possession. In this way, research becomes an ethical as well as poetic practice: a means not to fully recover the past, but to enter into a more attentive and responsible relationship with its remnants.