Viewing Otolith Group’s video art feels like a productive day spent in a university library, or jumping into a Wikipedia hole. Images, archival films and original footage shot in a wide range of locations are brought together in essayistic treatises on history, the environment, colonialism and lost utopian thinking. Tangents unravel and opaque connections are made. The nature of time is a recurring obsession.
Talking to them ahead of their upcoming exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art is no less educational. Their responses, like the work in the show, include a wide range of academic and literary quotations, poetry and lyric. “We are nothing but this infinity of traces. This is Gramscian work,” says co-founder Kodwo Eshun, referring to the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci. “And these traces show up as citations and citations in our work. We think so. It goes with the desire to communicate and to think more collectively. It puts us in a broader framework than the present.”
“It’s Gramscian work”… still from O Horizon, 2018, by Otolith Group. Photo: Courtesy of The Otolith Group and Lux, London
Eshun and Anjalika Sagar formed their partnership in 2002, their first film simply titled Otolith I. The 2-minute work is set in the future, narrated by a fictional descendant of Sagar. It jumps through history, looking at the Non-Aligned and Tri-Continental movements, the then looming war in Iraq and Sagar’s late grandmother, who was the president of the National Federation of Indian Women. This confusion of chronology is deliberate, the two say, describing it with reference to the writer JG Ballard as “science fiction of the present”.
“We’re interested in thinking about time vertically,” adds Sagar. “From the center of the Earth to outer space, anything that allows us to think about stories that never ended, or potential stories that didn’t develop because they were stopped.”
“The YBA movement reflects the collapse of collectivism” … detail from O Horizon, 2018 by Otolith Group. Photo: Courtesy of Otolith Group and Lux, London
Their decision to work as a couple was a reaction to the individualism of the art world in the YBA era. “Starting a band was a blow against the idea of a single artist,” she says. “It felt like the YBA movement reflected the breakdown of collectivism: this celebrity artist enjoying fancy dinners seemed so anti-punk to us. We also wanted to have an opaque name so people wouldn’t always ask us about our racial identity – so we could talk about the work and not about ourselves.”
An otolith is a part of the inner ear, a word that appealed to Eshun, then a music writer, and Sagar, a musician. “It’s a displacement effect,” agrees Eshun. “We can talk about otoliths and deviate from more traditional questions and scenarios [in which] it’s easy to find yourself positioned by well-intentioned institutions.”
Their latest work, Zone 2, made during the pandemic lockdown and released online for free, includes footage of the Black Lives Matter protests in London, the legacy of the Windrush generation and a walk through a cemetery. “In the same way that the pandemic disrupted normal capitalism, it opened up a new confrontation with mortality,” says Sagar. “This confrontation stretches back and forth in time. The crisis opens a rift in time, a rift.”
Their films often have an eerie or melancholic quality, an atmosphere that the pandemic must have only enhanced. Sagar questions the idea. “When does the apocalypse begin? For the people who were kidnapped and enslaved, the apocalypse begins then; when indigenous forms of deforestation began in the Amazon, the apocalypse may have begun then. There are many times when we can enter an apocalypse.
Detail from Sovereign Sisters, 2014, by Otolith Group. Photo: Peter Cox, Eindhoven/courtesy of Otolith Group and Lux, London
If Otolith Group’s subject matter is often political, they insist that much of their time is spent thinking formally. They try to approach filmmaking through the lens of different media. “We describe it as seeing in the key of listening,” Eshun says.
A 2017 film about Julius Eastman is a case in point. The three-part third movement of the third bar is played on two screens as four pianists play a score by the minimalist African-American composer. “It’s about two, three and four. I have six music pictures, but recorded with three cameras,” says Eshun. “So you have 18 visuals. It’s about doing the impossible. Music has become a guide for this work, but even when sound is not the subject of the work, we use it as a code to inform our filmmaking.”
Video is an object that invites you into reprogramming your neural networks
It’s all pretty lofty stuff, and sometimes their narrative teeters on the impenetrable. How do they compare this with accessibility requirements in museums? “We don’t accept that people don’t understand,” says Sagar. “When we were growing up, Luis Buñuel was at Channel 4. Endemol may have ruined television, but we reject the idea that people can’t understand complexity. This idea has become so prevalent in the UK – it’s a classic assumption.’
“People enjoy the experience that our films offer,” says Eshun. “We call it ritual in temporal programming.”
“Deprogramming,” Sagar corrected.
“Programming, deprogramming and reprogramming,” countered Eshun. “This is the video. It is an entity that invites you into reprogramming your neural networks or chrono-normative structures that you are forced to inhabit in your daily life. It invites you to a different relationship with time. Many people yearn for it, whether they have the language for it or not. But you don’t need language because it’s sensory.
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