Since 2002, the Otolith Group (Anjalika Sagar, b. 1968, London; and Kodwo Eshun, b. 1966, London) has produced films, audio works, installations, exhibitions, and texts informed by extensive research, decolonial thinking and transcultural friendship. Borrowing their name from a small apparatus within the inner ear of vertebrate animals—a sensitive structure by which bodies orientate, balance, recognize acceleration and position—the artists allegorically mark their intention to operate on multiple dimensions simultaneously.
At the center of this exhibition is the film installation O Horizon, a major work depicting the Visva Bharati school in Santiniketan (West Bengal, India), founded by the writer, educator, and social reformist, Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore in 1921. In guiding modern India toward cultural independence and transformation, Tagore anticipated some of the key issues of our global present, such as the environmental emergency, the threat of nationalist and religious extremisms, and the importance of intergenerational transmission. The Otolith Group gages the enduring presence of Tagore’s vision in present-day Santiniketan. The film is introduced by a poem from 1896 in which the latter questions future readers (“today in a hundred years”) about the arrival of spring season and the blooming nature around them. One of the opening impulses in O Horizon is to stage an encounter, in which the viewer responds to Tagore’s poetic inquiry about what might be sent back from the future.
