17 December 20, 7 pm

In English (Automatic live transcription also available via Otter.Ai)

The online talk takes place via Zoom:

https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_vsECDqsqQh6BuN1gls1f0A

In conjunction with the premiere of Onyeka Igwe’s new film, A So-Called Archive, the KW Production Series hosts a discussion with Igwe and historian Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, which interrogates the role of cultural production and its relation to imperial foundations of knowledge: the document, the archive, and the museum. A crucial text that informed Igwe’s own research as she made her new film, Azoulay’s book Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (Verso, 2019) seeks to expose the violent apparatus of the museum and the archive—institutions that order (and thereby have the power to narrate) time, space, and politics. This event looks to Azoulay’s writing and Igwe’s film as mutually resonant discourses that might inform not only how we look at the past, but how we might rehearse its unlearning.

With a forensic lens, Onyeka Igwe’s A So-Called Archive interrogates the decomposing repositories of Empire. Blending footage shot over the past year in two separate colonial archive buildings—one in Lagos, Nigeria, and the other in Bristol, United Kingdom—this double portrait considers the ‘sonic shadows’ that colonial images continue to generate, despite the disintegration of their memory and their materials. Igwe’s film imagines what might have been ‘lost’ from these archives. It mixes the genres of the radio play, the corporate video tour, and detective noir, with a haunting and critical approach to the horror of discovery.

In Lagos, the former Nigerian Film Unit was one of the first self-directed outposts of the British visual propaganda engine, the Colonial Film Unit (1932–1955). A So-Called Archive documents a building largely emptied of its contents: desolate rooms now house dust, cobwebs, stopped clocks, and rusty and rotting celluloid film cans. The films found in this building are hard to see, not only because of their condition, but also perhaps because people do not want to see them. Meanwhile, in Bristol Temple Meads, the former British Empire and Commonwealth Museum (2002–2009) was previously housed in one Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s most famous railway designs. The museum included photography, film, sound and object collections gathered from locations across the former British Empire. Like the Nigerian Film Unit, this building too has been purged; the museum closed shortly after reported allegations of the illegal sale of several items from its collection.

A So-Called Archive depicts these former vaults—along with their histories of hoarding, monetisation, documentation and now abandonment—as metonyms for the enduring entanglements between the UK and its former colonies. These sites were and continue to be home to purulent images that we cannot, will not, or choose not to see.

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay teaches political thought and visual culture at Brown University, Providence (US).

Onyeka Igwe is an artist and researcher working between cinema and installation, born and based in London, UK. In her non-fiction video work Igwe uses dance, voice, archives, sound design and text to create structural ‘figure-of-eights’, a format that exposes a multiplicity of narratives. The work comprises untieable strands and threads, anchored by a rhythmic editing style, as well as close attention to the dissonance, reflection and amplification that occurs between image and sound. Her works have been shown at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, Dhaka Art Summit, Berlin Biennale, and the London, Rotterdam International, Essay and Smithsonian African American film festivals. Igwe has exhibited at articule, Montreal; Trinity Square Video, Toronto; Jerwood Space 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. Onyeka Igwe’s A So-Called Archive (2020) is a co-commission by KW Institute of Contemporary Art, Berlin; Plug-In ICA, Winnipeg; and Mercer Union, Toronto; with support from Julia Stoschek Collection and OUTSET Germany_Switzerland. Additional support from Adam Pugh and Tess Denman-Cleaver at Tyneside Cinema Projections, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne.

Organised in collaboration with the Julia Stoschek Collection and OUTSET Germany_Switzerland, the KW Production Series is inspired by KW’s founding principles as a place of production, critical exchange, and thoughtful collaboration. This series seeks to identify and serve artists that are at a pivotal moment in their work and career—those who will benefit not only from the financial support and institutional visibility this opportunity provides, but also those who will be able to use the KW Production Series to significantly contribute towards the depth and rigor of their moving image practice.