There were Two Brothers with new names
A live twitter stream performance of a folk story that details the founding of the artist’s parent’s hometown in Nigeria.
the names have changed, including my own and truths have been altered
(2019) HD Video, 28 mins
This is a story of the artist’s grandfather, the story of the ‘land’ and the story of an encounter with Nigeria – retold at a single point in time, in a single place. The artist is trying to tell a truth in as many ways as possible. So the names have changed tell us the same story in four different ways: a folktale of two brothers rendered in the broad, unmodulated strokes of colonial British moving images; a Nollywood TV series, on VHS, based on the first published Igbo novel; a story of the family patriarch, passed down through generations; and the diary entries from the artist’s first solo visit to her family’s hometown.
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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.
Artist:
ONYEKA IGWEOnscreen premiere:
15.12.2021Commissioned and produced by GLASSHOUSE.