18.11.2022 – 5.2.2023
The Secession is delighted to announce What the Owl Knows, the solo exhibition of The Otolith Group named after the new moving image work directed by the artists. The post-cinematic practice of Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar is informed by an attention to an aesthetics of the essayistic that takes the form of a science fiction of the present that seeks to dramatise the interscalar catastrophes of the Racial Capitalocene.
The artists’ preoccupation with rearranging the intertemporal relationships between past, present and future often departs from the existing works of composers, producers, musicians, poets, theorists, and painters. The approaches to sound heard in the works of figures such as Julius Eastman, Codona, Drexciya, Etel Adnan, Una Marson, Denise Ferreira da Silva and Rabindranath Tagore imply a range of artistic methods for rethinking the force, mass and motion of images.
This way of hearing across media allows Eshun and Sagar to visit and revisit a sonic practice of image-making which invites audiences to listen to video as a choreography of images in motion. Such an approach asks audiences to encounter the present as a historical experience projected from the horizon of an expectant future. In The Third Part of the Third Measure (2017), to name only one of several such works, The Otolith Group redirects the temporal structure of the past by staging the music of composer Julius Eastman from the perspective of a future that confronts contemporary audiences with the militant figure of the gay guerrilla.
