15 October 2021 12pm
Event starts at 12:30PM EST
Onyeka Igwe speaks in conversation with Nasrin Himada and Milka Njoroge. This event contextualizes key themes running through Igwe’s work and the artist’s forthcoming solo exhibition at Mercer Union: THE REAL STORY IS WHAT’S IN THAT ROOM, which includes the new film a so-called archive (2020). In a double portrait of two colonial archive buildings—one in Lagos, Nigeria, and the other in Bristol, United Kingdom—a so-called archive considers the sonic shadows that colonial images generate despite the disintegration of their memory and materials. This program will include a screening of Igwe’s series of works No Dance, No Palavar (2017–18).
Presented in partnership with Black Portraiture[s]: Absent/ed Presence, a three-day conference hosted by Agnes Etherington Art Centre at Queens University, Kingston and presented by Wedge Curatorial Projects, Toronto.
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Onyeka Igwe is an artist and researcher working between cinema and installation, born and based in London, UK. Through her work, Onyeka is animated by the question—how do we live together?—with particular interest in the ways the sensorial, spatial and non-canonical ways of knowing can provide answers to this question. She uses embodiment, archives, narration, and text to create structural ‘figure-of-eights’, a form that exposes a multiplicity of narratives. The work comprises untying 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 in the UK and internationally at film festivals and galleries. 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.
Nasrin Himada is a Palestinian curator and writer. Living in Kingston, Ontario on Anishnaabe and Haudenosaunee Territory, they are Associate Curator at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston.
Milka Njoroge is a PhD student at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. Her research focuses on visual technologies with an emphasis on Black Finnish geographies.
BLACK PORTRAITURE[S]: Absent/ed Presence is the first of the Black Portraiture[s] series to take place in Canada. Led by Wedge Curatorial Projects, Toronto and hosted by Agnes Etherington Art Centre at Queen’s University, the conference invites artists, researchers, and scholars to explore Blackness as absent/ed presence in art, art history, performance, archives, museums, cultural production and technology. Presenters consider Blackness as unfixed, ungeographic, invisible and hypervisible, opaque, local and global, while asking: What is the role of abstraction in representation? What are the opportunities and limits in logics of representation? How can we, as thinkers and artists, realize new ways of seeing and what can be found therein? What is the current state of Black creative labour? What are methods for attending to that which the archive absents? What can be learned from all that evades archival capture? How might we imagine Blackness into and out of art’s past, present, and future?
For more information visit: https://agnes.queensu.ca/participate/talks-tours-events/black-portraitures-absent-ed-presence/
Support from NYU IAAA/CBVC, NYU Tisch Photography & Imaging, Toronto Arts Council, The Ford Foundation and the Inclusive Community Fund at Queen’s University.
Mercer Union’s 2021-22 Online Engagement Supported by TD Bank Group.
