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.

In the First Floor Gallery, two video works – both part of
No Archive Can Restore this Chorus of (Diasporic) Shame (2024/26) – unfold in close relation to one another.
Presented on the window front, the moving image blends with the institution’s architecture and urban surroundings, situating its sonic and visual field within the specific conditions of its display.
The film traces the afterlives of British colonialism in Nigeria through the abandoned site of the former Nigerian Film Unit in Lagos – once a key outpost of the Colonial Film Unit’s propaganda apparatus. Today, the building stands in disrepair. The images once housed there are difficult to access – not only due to their material degradation, but also because of a broader reluctance to confront what they contain.