CANCELLED: Reading Group with Onyeka Igwe at Glasgow Short Film Festival

This event has been cancelled in response to the current situation and to reduce the spread of Covid-19 (Coronavirus). Alternative arrangements or rescheduling will be arranged shortly.

Read our full statement here.

“I know that the archive is problematic; it misses a lot, it lies, it tells the story of the powerful in their own words and purports to be truth. And specifically looking at the colonial moving image archives is often visual trauma. So there is a tension in my exploration in the archive – pleasure at the same time as political and social concerns. I guess it’s important this tension is evident in the work, that the archive cannot just be re-represented or reimagined without context, without manipulation; that the images are in some way or can be too dangerous to be left alone”.

Onyeka Igwe, a‑n interview, 2018

Join artist Onyeka Igwe for this SUPERLUX reading group, with a focus on her current research that questions the use of physical archival material, thinking how to move beyond specific images that are held within colonial archives, while continuing to contend with issues at stake there. Onyeka is developing new strategies for addressing ideas around politics, meaning and history, considering how working with sound, physical space or movement might offer opportunities for sensuous work and ethical archival practice.

What are the ethical restraints and questions that arise when using archives? How to make work that contends with these issues without reproducing physical archive material? How to address audiences going beyond meaning making and cognition?

Onyeka will introduce some of her own past video works, research and methods that have involved periods of archival research, outlining how she has arrived at this current stage in her thinking.

This reading group will involve some group reading of a chapter of writer Julietta Singh’s book No Archive will Restore You (Punctum Books, 2018). Participants will be sent a PDF of this text when they book their place.

Programmed as part of Glasgow Short Film Festival

is an artist and researcher working between cinema and installation. She is born and based in London, UK. In her non-fiction video work, Onyeka uses dance, voice, archive and text to expose a multiplicity of narratives. Her works have shown at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, LUX, Berlin Biennale, and the London, Rotterdam International, Essay and Smithsonian African American film festivals. She has exhibited at articule, Montreal, Trinity Square Video, Toronto, Jerwood Space, London and The Showroom, London. She was awarded the New Cinema Award at Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival 2019 and the 2020 Arts Foundation Fellowship Award for Experimental Film.