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.
