Onyeka Igwe: Danced Insurgencies | Mousse

This text published in Mousse unpacks a trilogy of works, No Dance, No Palaver, by the artist and filmmaker Onyeka Igwe, exhibited at MoMA PS1. Igwe's trilogy centres on the Aba Women's War of 1929 in Southeastern Nigeria, using fragments from colonial films made around the same time in West and Central Africa as archival proxies. My text in turn relay's Igwe's rhythmic, counter-ethnographic cinema with meditations on the coloniality of gender, cinematic technology's built-in racial metaphysics, and Black feminine movement and dance as embodied practices/archives of anticolonial resistance and refusal. 

Cover image: Onyeka Igwe, Specialised Technique, 2018 (still)