Country: UK, Nigeria
Year: 2025
Duration: 18′ 39″
Director: Onyeka Igwe
Screenplay: Onyeka Igwe
Producers: Odunayo Odeyotin
Director of Photography: Granville Wilson
Editing: Onyeka Igwe
Music: Yinka Bernie, Femi Oriogun-Williams
The University of Ibadan, founded in 1948 as a colonial project in Nigeria, was intended to produce obedient subjects of the empire. After independence it flourished, and then war and loss of funding stripped it of its potential. Today it is a shadow of its former glory and the stage of a real story about social mobility. What is an African university? How to tell the story of Ibadan?
Onyeka Igwe is a London-born moving image artist and researcher. Her work addresses the question of how we live together, through sensory, spatial and counter-hegemonic forms of knowledge that reveal neglected histories. She has had solo and dual exhibitions at Tate Britain (2025), MoMA PS1 (2023), High Line (2022) and other institutions, as well as group exhibitions at, among others, the Venice Biennale and Lagos Biennale (2024). She is the recipient of multiple awards, including the Film London Jarman Award (2025), Foundwork Artist Prize (2021), Arts Foundation Futures Award for Experimental Short Film (2020) and Berwick New Cinema Award (2019).
