The Otolith Group

Opening: 09.09.2022, 7 pm. Followed by Opening party

Curated by Dr. Ivana Marjanović

On the occasion of its 100th exhibition, Kunstraum Innsbruck is honoured to present Two Sonic Works, the first solo exhibition of The Otolith Group in Austria. Two Sonic Works presents two audiovisual works by Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun of The Otolith Group that stage critical encounters with the aesthetics of the black avant-garde. The immersive two channel video installation The Third Part of the Third Measure (2017) reinterprets the ecstatic music composition and anti-authoritarian statements of the African American composer, conductor, pianist, organist and vocalist Julius Eastman. The video essay People To Be Resembling (2012) portrays the post-free jazz trio Codona, known for their reconfiguration of avant-garde jazz with harmonic traditions from North Africa, Latin America and South Asia, by way of an audiovisual choreography of photography, film and performance that evokes Codona’s migrant multi-instrumentalism in the dawning light of the Cold War’s imminent annihilation.

Staged as a performance for twin pianos played by Rolf Hind, Siwan Rhys, Zubin Kanga and Eliza McCarthy, The Third Part of the Third Measure interprets Julius Eastman’s aesthetic politics from a prospective perspective characteristic of the thinking of The Otolith Group. Dante Michaux and Elaine Mitchener’s reading of Eastman’s public statement on the occasion of his legendary concert at Northwestern University in January 1980 shows how Eastman’s theorization of musical form is inseparable from his political insights into America’s economic foundation in chattel slavery, the occupation of Afghanistan and Palestine by the Soviet Union and Israel and his desire for a militant gay politics of the future. These insights, in turn, confront today’s audiences with an understanding of the implications of Eastman’s intervention into America’s white and black avant-gardes for the politics of culture in the 21st Century. For Eshun and Sagar, whose thinking is informed by their reading of Brent Hayes Edwards’ Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination (2017) and Fred Moten’s In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Avant-Garde (2003), the experience of watching The Third Part of the Third Measure might be characterised as a matter of:

"watching in the key of listening", invoking political feelings of defiance and the collective practice of movement building that participates in the global struggles against neoreactionary authoritarianism. The Third Part of the Third Measure invites viewers to attend to exemplary ecstatic aesthetics of black radicalism that Eastman himself once described as "full of honour, integrity and boundless courage."

The second work, People to be Resembling, presents an experimental portrait of the trio Codona founded in 1978 by the African-American, white American and Afro-Brazilian composer-musicians Don Cherry, Collin Walcott and Nana Vasconcelos. Codona released three albums with Manfred Eicher’s ECM Records in 1978, 1980 and 1982 before their collaboration was interrupted by Walcott’s untimely death in a car accident in Germany. People to be Resembling transposes the openness of Codona’s experimentation into moving images, still images and still moving images to create a combinatorial choreography which evokes the cross-cultural politics of affinity through its continually shifting modalities of transmedial encounter. In the words of Sagar and Eshun:

People to be Resembling returns to 1978 in order to redream the recording process at Tonstudio Bauer as a meditation upon the relations between visual anthropology, anti-colonial choreography, nuclear annihilation and Weltmusik. In its arrangement of positive and negative with colour and black and white and still and moving imagery, The Otolith Group’s People to Be Resembling stages an experiment in mnemonic cohabitation inspired by the visionary music of Codona.

Two Sonic Works provides an insight into the aesthetics of The Otolith Group by attending to works in which the experience of sound acts as a primary element, energy and environment for listening across media. Each work, in its own way, enables an elusive and intensive experience of synergy with, and between, music, image and performance.

Two Sonic Works invites audiences into a face to face encounter with two out of many science fictions of the present assembled by Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun of The Otolith Group in the two decades of the 21st Century. The Otolith Group’s imperative to science fiction the present seeks to explore, analyse, dramatise and heighten the temporal structures of experience specific to the differentiated duress and distress of contemporary capitalogenic crisis. Structures of temporal experience that Sagar and Eshun characterise as the ‘temporal anomalies, anthropic inversions, and synthetic alienation of the posthuman, the inhuman and the non-human.’

The artistic work of The Otolith Group was presented at recent solo exhibitions at Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2019), Institute for Contemporary Art Virginia Commonwealth University (2020) and Irish Museum of Modern Art (2022) and recent group exhibitions that include Life Between Islands: Caribbean-British Art 1950s-Now, Tate Britain (2022), Turner’s Modern World, Tate Britain, (2021), Carnegie International, 57th Edition, Pittsburgh, (2019) and bauhaus imaginista, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2018).

Two Sonic Works at Kunstraum Innsbruck represents the first solo presentation of The Otolith Group in Austria.

Text: Ivana Marjanović

ON THE IDEA OF THE OTOLITH AND THE IDEA OF THE GROUP

This black Hamlet said his name was Otolith meaning a kind of minute calcareous body that makes it possible for a fish to be conscious of its position in space. Under the influence of gravity otoliths will press downward. As the position of the body moves, they will come in contact with sensory hairs in the ampullae, thus causing impulse to be transmitted to the brain by the auditory nerve. Because of the arrangement of the three canals in the three planes of space-from the dorsal part of the vestibule to the utriculus-provision is made for sensation of movements in all directions.

Dambudzo Marechera, The Black Insider, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1992,p. 75

Marechera draws attention to the ways in which otoliths operate within a sensory apparatus that make possible a dogfish or a shark’s consciousness of its stable or mobile position in a fluid space of turbulence.

When Marechera’s unnamed antagonist almost collides with Otolith, the disillusioned, transfigured damned ‘black Hamlet’ draped in black Elizabethan dress, in the corridor of a ruined, deserted faculty building in a war zone in the near future, this unrequited collision stages a dissonant meeting between differing but not necessarily oppositional ways of navigating space, managing scale and processing time.

In the glancing friction of Marechera’s proleptic encounter can be read an allegory for the process, the project and the practice of The Otolith Group.

For Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar of The Otolith Group, the morphological figure of the otolith operates as a kind of black box for withholding intention, gauging impact, measuring expectation and calculating discrepancy

A sensorial compass for orienting traps solicited as invitations camouflaged as participation dissimulated as encouragement and framed as shareable.

A flight recorder for updating the coordinates required for a speculation upon matters of gravity and questions of grace, gradient, devotion, illumination, numinosity, force, mass, measure, motion, stasis, stance, style, rest, pose, posture, fermata, caesura, duress, duration, increment, interiority and introspection.

Articulating the idea of the Otolith with the idea of the Group engenders a supernumerary form of life which alludes to the histories of collective practices invented by artists that theorise and writers that practice art within and beyond the precincts of the Disunited Kingdom.

A form of life which breaks with the idea of the singular artist and aligns itself with the crisis of authorship signalled by the advent of collective production.

Which conceives of itself as an interscalar vehicle that suspends the numerical and statistical imperatives of accountability, recognisability and representability demanded by institutions isomorphically formatted according to the area-studies protocols of Globally Heating Cultural Cold Forever Wars.

formatted according to the area-studies protocols of Globally Heating Cultural Cold Forever Wars.A form of life that announces its devotion to an aesthetics of discrepant abstraction, science fictions of the present, devotional cinematography, post-cinematic blackness and post-lens based platformalisms.

A form of life which understands itself as an intertemporal device for the exploration of temporal anomalies, synthetic alienations, anthropic inversions and the artificialisation of intelligence.

EVENTS DURING THE EXHIBITION

OPENING
09.09.2022, 19:00
TWO SONIC WORKS

GUIDED TOUR
17.11.22, 18:00
TWO SONIC WORKS
mit Dr.in Ivana Majanovic

ARTIST TALK
ZOOM TALK
with Anjalika Sagar und Kodwo Eshun


PANEL DISCUSSION
05.11.22, 18:30
CRITICAL CORRECTNESS
from Gina Disobey and the Black Community Innsbruck
in cooperation with Kunstraum Innsbruck