One Step Forwards, Two Steps Back

Onyeka Igwe

A slightly grainy blurred landscape image in two halves. On the left, a hand with dark brown skin and a silver bracelet around the wrist comes into the picture from the top left corner, two fingers, the index and middle fingers, are splayed out onto a surface about two thirds of the way down into the image with the thumb tucked away. The surface is a soft yellow-brown hue. The background behind the hand is a soft pale green. From the middle of the image a swoop of light swings outwards from the centre, across the surface, up towards and then behind the hand. Shadow falls either side of the swoop of light onto the surface the hand touches. The right side of the image is a mirror of the left, except the hand has moved further back, so only two thirds of a finger are left, and the swoop of light is slightly less intense and has moved up the image half a centimetre.

One step forward, one step back.

One step forward, two steps back.

One step forward, three steps back.

The loosening or maybe its slackening, relaxing from something previous. The old me, the me from two steps ago.

There is space for change, maybe disavowal.

That scares me. I need to be on guard because I wonder if this is giving up.

An acceptance of disappointment that we mature into.

Inevitably the light in our eye’s dims.

One step forward, one step back.

One step forward, two steps back.

One step forward, three steps back.

I’ve broken, split, lost myself and bruised this year.

There are signs of instability, going against those previous me’s.

Signs there is too much on the plate.

Signs I can’t hold myself in regularity.

Signs of an unsettling.

One step forward, one step back.

Two steps sideways, one step forward.

Three steps back, two steps sideways.

I vibrate with the strength of being.

I tremble with a desire for the world.

One step.

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Onyeka Igwe is a London born and 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, co-existence and multiplicity.

Onyeka’s practice figures sensorial, spatial and counter-hegemonic ways of knowing as central to that task. 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.

Recent solo exhibitions include at Peer, London (2024); MoMA PS1, New York (2023); The High Line, New York (2022); LUX, London (2021) and Jerwood Arts, London (2019). Recent group exhibitions have been held at Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool; Nigeria Pavilion, La Biennale di Venezia, Venice; Lagos Biennial, Lagos (2024); The Common Guild, Glasgow and South London Gallery, London (2023).

Igwe’s works are part of the British Film Institute Collection and The Arts Council Collection (UK). She was nominated for the MaxMara Artist Prize for Women 2022-24, awarded the 2021 Foundwork Artist Prize, 2020 Arts Foundation Futures Award for Experimental Short Film and was the recipient of the Berwick New Cinema Award in 2019. Igwe will present a solo exhibition for Art Now, Tate Britain in September 2025.