The duo behind Otolith talk about their complex collaged videos, which tackle everything from lost utopian thinking to the concept of vertical time. Why do they think the apocalypse is already here?
This week, the editors recall T. J. Demos’s “Openings” column on the Otolith Group, which appeared in the magazine’s pages in September 2006. A still taken from the Otolith Group’s digital animation Sovereign Sisters, 2014, is featured on the cover of the May issue. Additionally, the artists can be found in conversation with writer and curator Ed Halter in the latest episode of “Under the Cover.” It was art historian and cultural critic T. J. Demos who, back in 2006, first introduced our readers to the Otolith Group and its founders, Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar. Demos’s essay focuses on the
THE OTOLITH GROUP is a joint project between Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun, both lifelong Londoners of transcontinental heritage. Named for the delicate apparatus of the inner ear that senses balance and motion, Otolith have generated a substantial output over the course of two decades. The core products of Sagar and Eshun’s activity consist of more than twenty moving-image works of astonishingly varied forms, cinematic collages not merely of pictures and sounds but more fundamentally of concepts, inspired by and purloined from science fiction, political philosophy, and aesthetics, with histories
MILITANCY, COLONIALISM, the “subjunctivity” that Samuel R. Delany identified as key to science fiction, the possibilities of the essay-film: Certain concerns and themes may be traced across the career of the Otolith Group. But Otolith, founded in 2002 by Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun, has defied attempts to neatly summarize its practice. On the occasion of “Xenogenesis,” a traveling exhibition opening July 7 at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, after stints at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, and the Sharjah Art Foundation, critic Ed Halter and writer Tobi Haslett survey