Tate Britain will present a new film installation by Onyeka Igwe, our generous mother, as the next commission in its Art Now programme. The work extends the artist’s investigation of archives and contested histories by focusing on the Nigerian university where her mother studied, using the campus as a framework for examining the intersections of private memory and state narratives.
Centred on the University of Ibadan—described as Nigeria’s oldest degree-awarding institution—the film moves through the site’s tropical modernist architecture to chart political and familial trajectories from colonial foundations through independence and civil war to the present. Igwe layers contradictory accounts and hybridises modes, allowing fiction to intersect with documentary and analogue procedures to meet digital display, to consider how a single place sustains multiple, competing versions of the past.
The installation is organised as a sequence of viewing conditions that alter the image and its legibility. A Perspex sculpture first refracts and fragments the projection, underscoring the conditional character of historical interpretation. Midway through the space, the work shifts into slide-projection, a format that references instructional materials created to educate colonial officers in the mid-twentieth century, in which images were paired with scripts to be read aloud. Commandments adapted from the Ibadan Film Unit Guide are interwoven at this stage. The piece concludes as a large-scale digital projection on a cinematic wall, drawing on a lineage of radical filmmaking to probe how institutional narratives are constructed.
Art Now functions as Tate Britain’s free platform for contemporary practice and has provided early public visibility for artists who later achieved broad recognition, including Tacita Dean, Ed Atkins, Fiona Banner, Hurvin Anderson and Doris Salcedo. Igwe’s commission sits within this history while directing attention to pedagogy, infrastructure and administration as subjects of moving-image inquiry.
Across these phases, the curatorial logic is consistent: the work tests how exhibition formats and image technologies shape what counts as evidence. By routing a family biography through the built environment and bureaucratic residues of a major university, our generous mother treats documents, memories and moving images as materials subject to editing and re-reading, rather than as fixed records.
Venue and dates: Art Now, Tate Britain — 19 September 2025 to 17 May 2026.
