Onyeka Igwe, our generous mother 2025. © Onyeka Igwe
This autumn Tate Britain will premiere a new film installation by Onyeka Igwe, entitled our generous mother. The work continues Igwe’s interest in exploring archives and unravelling histories, in this case focused on the university in Nigeria where the artist’s mother studied in the 1970s. The exhibition is the latest instalment in Art Now, Tate Britain’s long-running programme of free contemporary exhibitions. Celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, Art Now continues to showcase emerging talent and new developments in the British art scene.
Igwe’s new work explores the University of Ibadan, the oldest degree-awarding institution in Nigeria. Moving through the university’s tropical modernist architecture, the film traces the building’s personal and political histories, from its colonial roots through national independence, civil war and towards the present day. It presents many contradictory accounts of the place, blurring fiction with reality, analogue with digital, and fragmentation with unity.
Visitors will enter a dark green space which hosts the film in multiple guises. It first takes the form of a Perspex sculpture that distorts and fractures the content, alluding to the multiple ways one place can be understood. Towards the middle of the space, the work takes the form of a slide projection. This references the format of instructional films made to educate 1950s colonial officers, which combined projected images with scripts to be read aloud. Commandments adapted from one such script – the Ibadan Film Unit Guide – are woven throughout the work. At the back of the gallery, the film then concludes in digital form, projected upon a large cinematic wall. Across all these different iterations of her work, Igwe draws from her own interest in radical filmmaking to deconstruct the history of the University of Ibadan, inviting us to step into the multiple narratives presented across the space.
Since the 1990s, Tate Britain’s Art Now exhibitions have recognised talent at its outset and provided a launch pad for artists who have gone on to become established figures on the international art scene. Over the last 30 years, the series has been an important public platform for the likes of Tacita Dean, Ed Atkins, Fiona Banner, Hurvin Anderson and Doris Salcedo.