The artist Onyeka Igwe is effortlessly cool, with tatted hands, a black denim jacket and a buzzcut. As we walked through the halls of Somerset House, where she has a studio, she greeted fellow artists. We settled into a quiet area in the games room, an empty communal space with books dotted around and a football table and started to chat.

Igwe spoke with a calm demeanour – although a little tentative at first. We discussed her latest exhibition and as the conversation developed, her passion shone through.

Igwe, British-Nigerian moving image artist and researcher, who was born and works in East London, discussed how Black revolutionaries, archival materials and Pan-Africanism influenced her latest exhibition: history is a living weapon in yr hand.

The exhibition is comprised of a two-screen film installation, A Radical Duet (2023) and is showcased at Peer Gallery in Hoxton until December 14.

Throughout her work there is a focus on Pan-Africanism, which Igwe describes as a “radical idea” but one that was “never really actualised”.

“[Pan- Africanism] is an idea that never really reached fruition. At that time when coming out of a formal colonial relationship with Britain or with other European nations, there was this moment when people were thinking of creating the world differently to how it already existed.

“And for me, that’s an important thing to hold on to, just because it didn’t happen in the 60s and 70s when countries became independent, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have a future or a possibility for today,” she continued.

A Radical Duet is set in London, 1947, a time when the capital was a hub of anti-imperialist and Black revolutionary activity. It follows two fictional characters: a Nigerian Christian socialist, women’s rights activist and union leader, Adura Falade and Sylvie St. Hill, a Jamaican student, dancer and playwright, both agitating for their respective countries independence from colonial rule.

Despite coming from different generations, at the end of the film the two characters work together to write a play, and this idea of collectively working together is something Igwe is attempting to answer through this exhibition.

Screening of A Radical Duet (2023) at Peer Gallery. Pic: Andy Keate. 

“I wanted to have two characters… from different generations but were actually bridging that divide and learning from one another”, she added.

Her work circulates around answering the political question of how, as a society, do we live together in the world. With this, she is interested in trying to answer or open conversations around political questions that are relevant today, but telling the story through history.

History is another central theme of Igwe’s work. Igwe came across the work of the revolutionist Diane di Prima when a friend was working on a new edition of di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters. From this encounter Igwe decided to use the line from the poem RANT for the title of the exhibition because the poem encapsulates “the possibility of changing history or making history”.

Igwe said: “History isn’t something that is stable and preordained, and we as people have some agency of how history goes.” 

Igwe said she wanted to highlight the idea that people have agency to enliven historical narratives, and she did this through the portrayal of Adura Falade and Sylvie St. Hill.

The idea of intergenerational exchange is important to Igwe because in her experience of being involved in political organising and activism, she said society hasn’t really learned from past experiences.

“You go back a little bit, and you realise that people have been fighting similar fights, and it feels a bit repetitive, and we’re not really learning from things that happened before, even in the recent past”, Igwe added.

For this exhibition, Igwe was influenced by lots of historical women who were involved in politics during this revolutionary period but not in a “mainstream way”. She said parts of the genesis of the project were thinking through Sylvia Wynter’s theories, especially her ideas of how we changed social reality.

Wynter is a Jamaican novelist, but in her early career, before she lived in Europe, she was an actress. Igwe said: “Many others around the time were also engaged in theatre and culture, and so I was drawing on those things to inform the plot and also the setting.”

Exploring historical figures was one of the ways Igwe researched the period of her film, but not the only part of her ample research for this project. She delved into the archives at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria, and the British Library. Alongside the archive research, she talked to lots of people who had ties to the generation of her film.

Igwe grew up in Leighton and she spent a lot of her childhood in East London, which informed parts of her work. Hackney Marshes is featured in Miracle on George Green, and she said it was inspired by “retracing old steps”, especially during lockdown era.

Showcasing her work in Peer Gallery is very special to her because the space is only a 10-minute cycle down the road from where she spent her childhood.

Igwe’s exhibition is part of Hackney Council’s Black History Month (BHM) programme. BHM is an institutionalised part of the cultural calendar in the UK, and Igwe told ELL she forgets about it: “until suddenly I get a bunch of like emails or requests or interests in my work, which I think is kind of funny”.

She continues: “I understand where it comes from, but I think that it’s important for Black histories to be much more integrated in a broader understanding of history than it is for them to have a particular month.

“I think it’s a way that people can feel like they’re doing something when they’re not. When it’s not actually fundamentally changing the way in which we think about history, or the way in which we think about the presence of Black people in the UK. If it’s always a margin or a special case. How does it emerge from that position?”

Next year, Igwe has an exhibition for Art Now at Tate Britain, where she is delving into ideas of her “fantasy archive in space”.