The Otolith Group's Science Fiction of the Present

In the context of an expansive practice that weaves archival and contemporary images and sounds, The Otolith Group blends poetry and fiction with the documents of lived histories to conceptualise speculative, inclusive futures and languages of becoming.
Stephanie Bailey, Ocula, July 6, 2022

The artist collective and non-profit organisation was founded in 2002 by artists and theorists Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun, who operate across the fields of research, art-making, performance, writing, curation, and discursive programming to explore vital political legacies that continue to haunt the present.

 

Video essays like In the Year of the Quiet Sun (2013) and Nucleus of the Great Union (2018) look at Pan-Africanism through the lens of an arrested futurism, confronting a contradictory sense of disillusionment and hope that is reflected in the non-aligned images and perspectives the collective translates into video essays woven through with tapestries of sound.

 

'We looked at the Bandung and Pan-African moment through a post-disillusionment lens because we were born after,' Sagar and Eshun explain.

67 
of 458