For more than two decades, the Otolith Group has created poetic moving-image works and cinematic collages influenced by science fiction, political philosophy, and anti-colonial struggle. Named after a structure in the inner ear that senses balance and motion by orienting the body to the Earth’s gravitational field, the Otolith Group is a joint venture between the artists, curators, and theorists Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun.
In the Year of the Quiet Sun (2013) takes its name from an astrological phenomenon that occurs every 11 years, during which the surface of the sun cools enough to allow observatories to study solar activity. In 1964 and 1965, numerous countries—including many newly independent African states—commemorated the occurrence by issuing stamps that celebrated the first scientific study of the sun’s surface. In the film, Sagar and Eshun explore the output of the Ghana Philatelic Agency, a New York–based company that designed stamps for Ghana from 1957 until the military overthrow of the nation’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, in 1966. For the artists, the final year of Nkrumah’s leadership marked a moment in which the astronomical and political calendars of the Earth intersected, and the global ambition of Pan-Africanism was not only a dream but a material reality.
Recently, I sat down with Sagar and Eshun to discuss how these stamps were both “moving images” that enabled the infrastructure of burgeoning African states and agents in the making and unmaking of the Pan-African project of independence.
—Gee Wesley, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Media and Performance Art
