Joanne Igbuwe (1996) Amsterdam-based visual artist of Nigerian heritage whose practice begins with images, archives and the traces they leave behind.
Working across photography, drawing, painting, text and increasingly through three-dimensional forms such as jewellery she brings together fragments from personal, cultural and historical sources. Rather than treating the archive as a fixed collection of facts, she approaches it as a living space—one in which images, memories, histories and emotions continue to shift, collide and acquire new meaning.
Her practice is rooted in questions about the body, intimacy and colour, but these themes are never approached as stable categories. They are experienced as something fluid, inherited and continuously negotiated. Her Emotional Archive emerges from this understanding of the archive as something that is not only stored outside of us, but also carried within us.
What does the body remember?What remains when an image, object or story has disappeared? And how do experiences that have been inherited, encountered or internalised become part of our own emotional landscape?For me, an archive is therefore not simply a place where things are preserved. It can also be a place of feeling. A gesture, a colour, an image, a material, a fragment of text or an object can hold an emotional charge that exceeds its original context. The Emotional Archive explores this space between the visible and the felt.It brings together personal memory, cultural inheritance and historical imagery, allowing them to exist alongside one another without forcing them into a single narrative. The work moves between what can be documented and what can only be sensed; between public histories and private experiences; between what has been given to us and what we choose to carry forward.This process also opens a critical reflection on representation.Images do not simply show the world. They participate in constructing it. They can classify, idealise, exclude, romanticise, distort and preserve. They can tell us who we are, or who we are expected to be. For someone navigating a bi-cultural heritage, these images can become particularly charged: they can contain recognition and alienation at the same time.Igbuwe's work does not seek to resolve these contradictions. Instead, she gives them form.Through the movement between two- and three-dimensional practices, familiar images are transformed into new visual and material languages. Photography can become drawing; drawing can become painting; an image can become an object; an object can become a carrier of memory. Materials are not only chosen for their visual qualities, but for their ability to hold associations, histories and sensations.In this way, Emotional Archive is both a personal and collective investigation.It asks how histories enter the body, how culture becomes memory, how memory becomes emotion, and how emotion can become material.The archive is no longer only something to look at.It is something to feel, to carry, to transform—and sometimes, to let go.
let.it.collapse.
