Artists: Onyeka Igwe in conversation with Jeanette Pacher

British-Nigerian artist, filmmaker, and researcher Onyeka Igwe talks with curator Jeanette Pacher about her project No Archive Can Restore this Chorus of (Diasporic) Shame (2024/26) that lends its title also to her solo show; her interest in sound, especially protest songs, and her love for sacred harp singing, filming in the abandoned Nigerian Film Unit in Lagos, and her iterative practice. Their conversation was recorded on 11 June 2026 at the Secession. Onyeka Igwe No Archive Can Restore this Chorus of (Diasporic) Shame 12.6. – 30.8.2026 In the exhibition, two video works unfold in close relation to one another. The film traces the afterlives of British colonialism in Nigeria through the abandoned site of the former Nigerian Film Unit in Lagos – once a key outpost of the Colonial Film Unit’s propaganda apparatus. Today, the building stands in disrepair. The images once housed there are difficult to access – not only due to their material degradation, but also because of a broader reluctance to confront what they contain. Presented on the window front, the moving image blends with the institution’s architecture and urban surroundings, situating its sonic and visual field within the specific conditions of its display. More Onyeka Igwe is a London-born & based moving image artist and researcher. Her work is aimed at the question: how do we live together? Not to provide a rigid answer as such, but to pull apart the nuances of mutuality and co-existence in our deeply individualized world. Onyeka's practice figures sensorial, spatial and counter-hegemonic ways of knowing as central to that task. For her, the body, archives and narratives both oral and textual act as a mode of enquiry that makes possible the exposition of overlooked histories. The work comprises untying strands and threads, anchored by a rhythmic editing style, as well as close attention to the dissonance, reflection and amplification that occurs between image and sound. Solo exhibitions include our generous mother, Tate Britain (2025), history is a living weapon in yr hand, Bonington Gallery and Peer, UK (2024), A Repertoire of Protest (No Dance, No Palaver), MoMA PS1, New York (2023), The Miracle on George Green, The High Line, New York, USA (2022), a so-called archive, LUX, London, UK and THE REAL STORY IS WHAT'S IN THAT ROOM, Mercer Union, Toronto, Canada (2021), and Corrections, with Aliya Pabani, Trinity Square Video, Toronto, Canada (2018). Onyeka jointly received the 2025 Film London Jarman Award, was awarded the 2021 Foundwork Artist Prize (2021), Arts Foundation Futures Award for Experimental Short Film (2020) and was the recipient of the Berwick New Cinema Award in 2019. Her video works are screened at film festivals internationally. Jeanette Pacher is a curator at the Vienna Secession since 2007. She is a regular lecturer in the Department of Site-Specific Art at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, member of the BIG ART advisory board, and from 2023 to 2025, she was jury member of KÖR – Art in Public Space Vienna. The Dorotheum is the exclusive sponsor of the Secession Podcast. Programmed by the board of the Secession. Jingle: Hui Ye with an excerpt from Combat of dreams for string quartet and audio feed (2016, Christine Lavant Quartett) by Alexander J. Eberhard Audio Editor: Paul Macheck Executive Producer: Jeanette Pacher