Cinenova Now Showing | Onyeka Igwe

For the August Cinenova Now Showing, artist-filmmaker Onyeka Igwe has chosen to show a selection of films from the Cinenova collection alongside her own work.

Her Name in My Mouth - Onyeka Igwe (UK, 2017, 6mins)
Her Name in My Mouth revisions the Aba Women’s War, the first major anticolonial uprisings in Nigeria, using embodiment, gesture and the archive. The film is structured around the repurposing of archival films from the British propaganda arm, The Colonial Film Unit, cut against a gestural evocation of the women’s testimonies. Her Name in My Mouth invokes the artist own female ancestors in this filmic revocation of the Aba Women’s War that privileges the body as a site of knowledge.

Now Pretend - Leah Gilliam (USA, 1992, 11mins)
Now Pretend is an experimental investigation into the use of race as an arbitrary signifier. Drawing upon language, personal memories and the 1959 text, "Black Like Me", it deals with Lacan's "mirror state" theories of beauty and the movement from object to subject.

Shades - Jamika Ajalon (UK/ USA, 1995, 13mins)
A lyrical, sensual piece which deals with issues surrounding skin colour and codes of Blackness.

The Body Beautiful - Ngozi Onwurah (UK, 1990, 23mins)
This bold exploration of the relationship between a white mother who undergoes a radical mastectomy and her black daughter who embarks on a modelling career reveals the profound effects of body image and the strain of racial and sexual identity on their charged, intensely loving bond.

Onyeka Igwe is an artist filmmaker, programmer and AHRC funded PhD researcher at University of the Arts London. She uses embodiment, voice, archive and text in non-fiction video work to create structural figure of eights, exposing a multiplicity of narratives. Her video works have shown at the V&A; Nuit Blanche, Toronto; Guildhall Art Gallery; and London, Internationale Kurtzfilmtage Wintherthur, Edinburgh Artist Moving Image, and Hamburg film festivals.

Leah Gilliam earned her Masters in Fine Arts, Film and Video at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 1991. Her work destabilizes categories of identity, temporality, and genre. Her work has been shown extensively at festivals and screenings internationally, including the New York Video Festival, Film Forum (Los Angeles), Institute of Contemporary Art (London), the Whiteney Biennial (New York), and the Festival Pan Africain du Cinema de Ouagadougou (Bukino Faso).

Jamika Ajalon is an inter-disciplinary artist fortunate enough to have collaborated with many brilliant creatives across the globe. Mediums include written and spoken word, sound, and photography, film, video, text, and music.

Ngozi Onwurah takes on the issues of time and space in her work which embraces heterogeneity and multiple sites of subjectivity. Onwurah consistently navigates and challenges the limits of narrative and ethnographic cinema by insisting that the body is the central landscape of an anti-imperialist cinematic discourse.

Cinenova: Now Showing began in March 2015 and runs monthly. The series intends to materialise relationships between contemporary artist moving image practice and the feminist and organising legacies present in the Cinenova collection. Now Showing future invited protagonists include: Kerstin Schroedinger, Kimberley O'Neill, Holly Antrum, Alberta Whittle, Letitia Beatriz, Olivia Plender and more to be announced. Past events have been with Charlotte Prodger, Tina Keane and Elizabeth Barret, Oreet Ashery, Leone Knight and Jenni Olson; Alex Martinis Roe, Helen Grace and Margot Nash; Ayesha Hameed and Sandra Lahire; Jamie Crewe and Tran, T Kim Trang; Kathryn Elkin and Sarah Turner; Noski Deville and Patrick Staff; Kari Robertson and Judith Barry; Nooshin Farhid and Lis Rhodes; Rehana Zaman and Lai Ngan Walsh & the Law Collective; Lucy Clout, Tracey Moffatt and Susan Stein; Cara Tolmie, Kimberley O'Neill and France-Lise McGurn, Judith Barry and Ruth Novaczek; Justice for Domestic Workers and Leeds Animation Co-op; Claire Hope and Judith Barry; Lucy Parker and Adriana Monti; Kate Davis, Margaret Salmon and Sheffield Film Co-op; Richard John Jones and Karen Everett; Grace Schwindt and Kim Longinotto.

Image: Her Name in My Mouth - Onyeka Igwe