‘I can frustrate you, hypnotize you, bore you’: Jarman Prize winners make archives fly | art

SOmersett House in London was known as the “National Beehive,” says artist and film-maker Onyeka Igwe, leading the way through corridors and stone steps to her studio at the inner edges of the building. As the former home of the Inland Revenue, the public register office responsible for registering births, deaths and marriages, Somerset House held all the information needed to levy taxes and manage the population. “There were a lot of workers here,” Igwe says.

Archives are the raw material for her films – stories of resistance, dispossession, and the power of community activism for which she and fellow London-born artist and writer and musician Morgan Quaintance were joint recipients of the 2025 Film London Jarman Award.

Like Igwe, Quintance was fascinated by history, which appears and recedes in his films in a random, seemingly illogical way, as it does in our individual and collective consciousness. In Repetitions, one of two films praised by a jury made up of experts in the art and film worlds, Quintance collects the fragments and debris of 30 years of personal history — a scan of his injured knee, his feet on the stairs, a crouching boy — and mixes them with footage of black feminist activists from a century ago, and an activist voice for workers’ rights during the Covid pandemic.

In The Radical Duo, Igwe finds gaps in the history of the burgeoning anti-colonial movement in London in the 1940s, imagining the meeting of two black activists who may have crossed paths. In the spaces left empty by archives, books and blueprints, Igwe situates a speculative past in a film that draws threads of history through the present.

When we met, a few days before the announcement, neither Igwe nor Quintance knew they had won, but having been shortlisted previously, the duo maintain the calm demeanor of old hands.

Presented annually, this award, inspired by the late Derek Jarman, includes a cash prize of £10,000, to recognize and support artists working with moving images. This is the first time since its inception in 2008 that the award has been presented jointly, with the financial prize being divided between the winners.

Both artists work across different media, but they are equally convinced of the unique power of film: “It’s thriving, it’s vibrant, and some of the best work is happening in this country,” Quintance says. Igwe, whose current exhibition at Tate Britain, “Our Generous Mother,” includes sculptures, films and slides on display, enjoys film’s ability to accommodate different forms, but says: “It is important to know why something is a film, rather than an essay or a poem.”

While for Igwe history is an anchor in the present, for Quaintance it is a point of friction into which the individual stumbles and is forced to confront a much bigger picture. “There’s a new idea that you have to be collectively conscious,” he says. “You have to think: ‘Where do I stand in relation to global events?’” “We’re all supposed to be on a global vigil, you know? I don’t lament it, I’m just fascinated by it. “It is a contemporary situation.”

As a medium perhaps more than any other that commands the full, unmediated attention of an audience, and at a time when viewers are more visually sophisticated than ever before, film is the perfect way to evaluate our ability to influence others beyond our immediate circle.

Repetition, a film that stutters and repeats like a paused videotape, is an experiential experience for viewers who are presented with a disjointed film in which sound, time, and image are separated and distorted. “From a formal perspective, I was interested in how repeatable something could be, and what effect that would have on the viewer,” Quintance says. “Maybe I can push you into a state of hypnosis. I can frustrate you, make you feel predictable, or push you toward boredom. These are all things that will effectively manipulate you as you watch something.”

When asked about future plans that can be realized with the prize money, Quintance points to his exhibition Available Light at Chelsea Space in London, where the film serves as the focal point of a larger touring project about the difficulties of modern urban life. For Igwe, an adaptation of a Doris Lessing novel, the next chapter of “Radical Duality” calls out to her.

But their interest in grassroots activism is the root cause of their shared passion for the English Civil War. For Igwe, it started at school, when she realized that “people had these primitive communist ideas, and were thinking about radical alternative ways of life that people still think about today. That sparked an interest in thinking about the present throughout history.”

“I would like to direct a drama about the English Civil War,” Quintance says. “I would love to do something like trace Steve McQueen’s Small Axe from the Civil War to today.” It may be the perfect way to invest their joint gains.