Presented alongside Onyeka Igwe’s solo exhibition history is a living weapon in yr hand, discover a selection of materials selected by the artist, that highlight key women who embraced creative activities to challenge imperialism and imagine new Pan-African realities.
In looking into the history of Pan-Africanism from the 1930s up until Howard Macmillan’s famous Winds of Change speech in 1960, many famed and celebrated men emerge as having spent time in the UK before rising to prominence in Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia as political leaders. The women are lesser known and celebrated, but figures like Amy Ashwood Garvey, Katherine Dunham, Una Marson, Sylvia Wynter and Funmilayo Ransome Kuti played their part using music, poetry, dance and theatre to challenge imperialism and imagine new Pan-African futures.
Join us for a first look round the exhibition on Friday 12 January from 6–8 pm.
Book your free ticket
Images by Jules Lister
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, co-existence and multiplicity.
Onyeka’s practice figures sensorial, spatial and counter-hegemonic ways of knowing as central to that task. 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. She has had solo/duo shows at MoMA PS1, New York (2023), High Line, New York (2022), Mercer Union, Toronto (2021), Jerwood Arts, London (2019) and Trinity Square Video, London (2018). Her films have screened in numerous group shows and film festivals worldwide.
Currently, she is Practitioner in Residence at the University of the Arts London and she will participate in the group show ‘Nigeria Imaginary’ in the national pavilion of Nigeria at the upcoming 60th Venice Biennial in 2024. She was awarded the New Cinema Award at Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival 2019, 2020 Arts Foundation Fellowship, 2021 Foundwork Artist Prize and has been nominated for the 2022 Jarman Award and Max Mara Artist Prize for Women. Onyeka is represented by Arcadia Missa Gallery.
With audio description and creative captions
The exhibition will be centred around a new two-screen adaptation of Igwe’s dual timeline experimental film A Radical Duet (2023). The film imagines what happened when two women of different generations, but both part of the post-war independence movement, came together in London to put their fervour and imagination into writing a revolutionary play. The film depicts this process, and envisages what that play would look like, if staged today.
1947 London was a hub of radical anti-colonial activity. International intellectuals, artists, and activists like Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, Sylvia Wynter, C.L.R. James, Kwame Nkrumah, and George Padmore were all in London at the eve of the end of British colonialism. Individually, they were agitating for their respective countries’ national independence, but did they meet? And if they all did, what did they discuss? What did they conjure?
The film will be accompanied by elements of the set design and props from the making of A Radical Duet, taking inspiration from Sylvia Wynter’s ideas on theatrical adaptation. Wynter builds on Brechtian principles of modern epic theatre and advises on how set design can support a theatre to ‘explode [social] fears by bringing them out into the light of day’.
For this exhibition, Igwe will be working with Collective Text, an organisation supporting accessibility in art and film through creative captioning, audio description and interpretation.
A Radical Duet was commissioned by FLAMIN Productions through FILM LONDON Artists’ Moving Image Network with funding from Arts Council England.
history is a living weapon in yr hand is produced in collaboration with Peer Gallery, London, where it will be presented in autumn 2024.
Photographs by Jules Lister
A Microsoft Word version of this information, including floor plan of space is available to download here.
Accessibility Guidance
This accessibility guidance was written in collaboration with Onyeka Igwe, Bonington Gallery and Collective Text.
Exhibition Information
history is a living weapon in yr hand is captioned and audio described. The two-channel film in the exhibition has animated captions which include sound descriptions.
There is an audio described introduction to the exhibition that can be accessed here.
There is an audio described introduction accompanied by imagery from the exhibition that can be accessed here.
At the gallery, audio description can be accessed via radio frequency headsets with two channels. A switch beside the volume slider enables you to flick between channel 1 which plays the audio described introduction linked above and channel 2 which plays the exhibition audio description synced to the film and props. There will be two listening stations for audio description, at the front entrance to the right of the stairs and at the back of the gallery next to the accessible lift entrance. An invigilator will provide you with headphones, you can remain at these listening stations or can be assisted to the viewing benches in front of the screens by an invigilator. There are tactile pathway guidelines that direct you to the props in the exhibition, assistance can also alternatively be provided by an invigilator.
Please note that the exhibition space is dark. The film and/or spotlights are the primary light source. Sound plays in the space at a high volume. Let us know in advance if you require the room to be brighter or a lower volume.
The props in the exhibition are illuminated by a timed lighting system. Each prop has a distinct lighting colour and is accompanied by the sound “ACTION” which is captioned on the screens the first time it happens in the sequence, afterwards you are encouraged to move around the space.
The total running time of the exhibition is 32 minutes. There will be large print exhibition guides available through the invigilators.
The gallery is wheelchair accessible. General Access Information for the gallery is available here
For any additional questions or access needs contact Tom Godfrey: tom.godfrey@ntu.ac.uk
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, co-existence and multiplicity.
Onyeka’s practice figures sensorial, spatial and counter-hegemonic ways of knowing as central to that task. 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.
She has had solo/duo shows at MoMA PS1, New York (2023), High Line, New York (2022), Mercer Union, Toronto (2021), Jerwood Arts, London (2019) and Trinity Square Video, London (2018). Her films have screened in numerous group shows and film festivals worldwide.
Currently, she is Practitioner in Residence at the University of the Arts London and she will participate in the group show ‘Nigeria Imaginary’ in the national pavilion of Nigeria at the upcoming 60th Venice Biennial in 2024. She was awarded the New Cinema Award at Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival 2019, 2020 Arts Foundation Fellowship, 2021 Foundwork Artist Prize and has been nominated for the 2022 Jarman Award and Max Mara Artist Prize for Women. Onyeka is represented by Arcadia Missa Gallery.
Peer is a not-for-profit free-to-access space for contemporary art, located in the neighbourhood of Hoxton in East London. They place artists, young people and local communities at the heart of their internationally recognised programmes of public exhibitions held in their street-facing gallery, an ongoing series of workshops, talks and events, as well as offsite artist commissions produced in the local area.
