July 1–31, 2023
e-flux Film is very pleased to present two films by Onyeka Igwe, Her Name in My Mouth (2017, 6 minutes) and Specialised Technique (2018, 7 minutes), as the July 2023 edition of our monthly series Staff Picks.
Both films are part of Igwe’s trilogy No Dance, No Palaver (2017–18)—currently on view at the artist’s solo show at MoMA PS1, through August 21, 2023—which covers research into the Aba Women’s War of 1929. All of the films in this trilogy use the first major anti-colonial uprising in Nigeria as an entry point to experiment with colonial moving images relating to West Africa during the first half of the twentieth century. No Dance, No Palaver serves as an attempt to use critical proximity: being close to, with, or amongst the visual trauma of the colonial archive to transform the way in which we know the people it contains.
Invoking a lineage of female ancestors through embodiment, gesture, and the archive, Her Name in My Mouth reimagines the Aba Women’s War, a major anti-colonial uprising in Nigeria.
William Sellers and the Colonial Film Unit—a propaganda and educational film production organization established by the British government in 1939—developed a framework for colonial cinema. It included slow edits, no camera tricks, and minimal camera movement. Hundreds of films were created in accordance to this rule set. In an effort to recuperate black dance from this colonial project, Specialised Technique attempts to transform this material from studied spectacle to livingness.
Watch the films here.
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.
About the series
Staff Picks is a monthly streaming series on e-flux Film of staff picks and recommended videos designed to disrupt the monotony of an algorithm. Before the end times of big data, we used to discover suggested content along dusty shelves in video rental stores, where Post-it notes scribbled by shift workers implored us to experience the same movies that made them guffaw, scream, or weep. Sometimes the content bored us, sometimes it overwhelmed us, and sometimes, as if by magic, it was just right. e-flux invites you to relive this rental store mode of perusal, with personalized picks curated through judgment that does not take into consideration your viewing history.
For more information, contact program [at] e-flux.com.
