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
Inspired by the kilns of Stoke-on-Trent, the Chicago artist’s Black Chapel will host bands, including his own, and also provide ‘a place of quietude’ where even the British weather is welcome
IN SHIFTING THE SILENCE (2020), her last book of poetry published in her lifetime, Etel Adnan begins with the word yes and ends, just seventy-four pages later, with an image of night falling like snow, erasing a landscape she has conjured from memory or imagination. In between, Adnan assembles a delicate inventory of the places and ideas she loved over nearly a century. Her colorful and unabashedly cosmopolitan life crisscrossed a world of upheaval the aftermath of the Ottoman Empire’s collapse; the cruelties of French colonization; the breakdown of the state in Lebanon; wars in Algeria, Vietnam,