Onyeka Igwe: No Archive Can Restore this Chorus of (Diasporic) Shame
June 12–August 30, 2026
Katherine Hubbard: The Great Room
Katherine Hubbard began her five-year project The Great Room in 2020, at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, when her mother, Antonette Berger, was diagnosed with a form of dementia. The exhibition at the Secession features a series of photographic encounters between the two women. At its centre is Berger’s first-floor apartment in a Victorian house, which becomes the stage for the works. The images emerge from different rituals and register a reciprocity in which grief and tenderness, disorientation and intimacy coexist. In many of the images, Hubbard includes herself—often with tripod and camera. This gesture renders transparent the act of image-making, but also reads as an ethical act: a refusal to leave her mother alone within the frame.
Katherine Hubbard was born in Philadelphia, USA, in 1981 and lives between Stone Ridge, NY, and New York.
Programmed by the board of the Secession.
Curated by Bettina Spörr.
The exhibition has been developed in partnership with Studio Voltaire, London where a further chapter will be presented from October 7, 2026 to January 10, 2027. Through this collaboration, the partners have co-commissioned new works by the artist.
Onyeka Igwe: No Archive Can Restore this Chorus of (Diasporic) Shame
Onyeka Igwe’s practice excavates the unstable ground of the colonial archive, approaching it not as a fixed repository of knowledge but as a site of friction, opacity, and unresolved violence. Her films and installations confront the archive by attending to what is missing, suppressed, or rendered inaudible. Igwe reactivates materials often treated as inert—celluloid reels, visual records of past bureaucracies, abandoned and forgotten spaces. What emerges is not a reconstruction of history but an attunement to its dissonances: a historiography felt through the body, where colonial violence, far from being in the past, persists as a condition of the present.
Onyeka Igwe was born in London, UK, in 1986 and lives in London.
Programmed by the board of the Secession.
Curated by Jeanette Pacher.
Publications
The exhibitions are accompanied by publications. The digital publications are available for free here.
Press contact: presse@secession.at / press materials
