Onyeka Igwe

history is a living weapon in yr hand

★★☆☆☆

On until 14 December 2024

Igwe’s film installation imagines a group of African and Caribbean intellectuals like C.L.R. James and Kwame Krumah conspiring in late 1940s London. One screen enacts these “Mavericks’” fictional meeting. They talk politics, tactics, and… agitprop art. A second, modern-day scene completes the artifice. Igwe has actors workshop a stage play that would have seriously advanced the cause of anti-imperialism had the Mavericks actually written and staged it.

Art could have freed them, and it can free us now! Such sentimental world-making is political art’s favourite pastime today. Not without good precedent, of course. Igwe’s project, however, builds not a world but a wordy counter-historical thesis. By showing her working while neglecting the artefact, she mixes up art’s and its subjects’ autonomy. The Mavericks wanted a weapon, Igwe leaves them a toy. 


notes and notices are short and curt exhibition reviews. Read more:

Joanne Burke, Oes with works like Esses at Soft Opening ★★★★☆

Joanne Burke

Oes with works like Esses

★★★★☆

Hot metal is that, like water, it spills away from the mould.

Nicole Eisenman, What Happened at Whitechapel Gallery ★★★☆☆

Nicole Eisenman

What Happened

★★★☆☆

There’s a Bosch hellscape dedicated to Trump and a whole “basket of deplorables” polishing their guns in a prepper cell.

Abdullah Al Saadi, Sites of Memory, Sites of Amnesia, UAE pavilion in Venice ★★★☆☆

Abdullah Al Saadi

Sites of Memory, Sites of Amnesia

★★★☆☆

The exhibition’s user experience rivals that of the Apple Store.

Anastasia Pavlou, Reader at Hot Wheels ★★☆☆☆

Anastasia Pavlou

Reader, Part 2; The Reader Reads Words in Sentences

★★☆☆☆

In this game of aesthetic cognition, the idea which survives is of the artist thinking.

Milly Thompson, My Body Temperature is Feeling Good at Goldsmiths CCA ★★☆☆☆

Milly Thompson

My Body Temperature is Feeling Good

★★☆☆☆

Oh, what is it to be a woman in a world of nothing but!

Yannis Maniatakos, Four Paintings at Sylvia Kouvali ★★★☆☆

Estate of Yiannis Maniatakos

Four Paintings

★★★☆☆

Examining the paintings in the gallery’s bright lights doesn’t lift their mystery.

×