The Otolith Group, A Lure a Part Allure Apart

Bétonsalon - Center for Art and Research pre­sents the first solo exhi­bi­tion in France by The Otolith Group, the London-based artist col­lec­tive founded by Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar. Concerned with exploring the lega­cies and poten­tial­i­ties of the essay film, cos­mopolitan mod­ernisms, spec­u­la­tive futures and science-fic­tions, The Otolith Group has devel­oped a mul­ti­faceted prac­tice that inte­grates video and film making, exhi­bi­tion cura­tion, pub­li­ca­tion and the elab­o­ra­tion of public plat­forms.

At the core of the exhi­bi­tion is The Otolith Trilogy, con­sisting of Otolith I (2003), Otolith II (2007) and Otolith III (2009), each of which con­siders the poten­tial of specific polit­ical and cul­tural moments to evoke alter­na­tive futures. Projected according to a set schedule, these essay-films alter­nate with assem­blages that revisit The Otolith Group’s lec­ture per­for­mance Communists Like Us (2006), their audio-essay The Secret King in the Empire of Thinking (2011) and the work of Marvel comics artist Jack Kirby and artist Vidya Sagar, both of which informed the method­olo­gies of The Otolith Trilogy.

These assem­blages, designed spe­cially for Bétonsalon - Center for Art and Research, con­sti­tute a near-sub­lim­inal exhi­bi­tion that appears and dis­ap­pears within the sched­uled screen­ings. The folding of a tem­po­rary dis­play inside a sceno­graphic propo­si­tion opens up new pas­sage­ways through The Otolith Group’s con­stel­la­tion of allu­sions and ref­er­ences. A Lure a Part Allure Apart embraces The Group’s pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with the dis­junc­tions of tem­po­rality and the science-fic­tions of the alter­na­tive pre­sent.

Projections’ schedule:
Otolith I: 11h00, 13h40, 16h20
Otolith II: 11h30, 14h10, 16h50
Otolith III: 12h40, 15h20, 18h00

View of the exhibition "The Otolith Group, A Lure a Part Allure Apart" with Otolith II, 48 mn, 2007. Bétonsalon - Center for Art and Research, Paris, 2011. Image: Aurélien Mole

Otolith I is set in the 22nd Century, when humans are no longer able to sur­vive on earth and live in per­ma­nent micro­gravity onboard the International Space Station (ISS). Otolith I is nar­rated by exoan­thro­pol­o­gist Dr. Usha Adebaran Sagar, the future descen­dent of Anjalika Sagar; Adebaran Sagar’s recon­structs life as it was on earth through her research into the archives of dead media. Staging an encounter between the anger and depres­sion of the 2003 protests against the Coalition of the Willing’s inva­sion of Iraq and the real-life meeting in Moscow, 1973 between cos­mo­naut Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman to orbit the Earth in 1963 and Anasuya Gyan-Chand, President of the National Federation of Indian Women, Otolith I evokes the non-metaphor­ical weight­less­ness of alien inti­macy.
Again nar­rated by Dr.Adebaran Sagar, Otolith II descends from the agravic envi­ron­ment of the ISS to com­pare the hyper­gravic com­pres­sion of Dharavari, Mumbai’s megaslum with the mid-cen­tury planned urbanism of Chandigarh. Otolith II explores the pres­sures endured by cit­i­zens inhab­iting these con­trasting and com­peting ver­sions of the city of tomorrow. Contemporary moments from lives lived in the shadow
of Le Corbusier’s megas­truc­tural com­plex are jux­ta­posed with scenes of imma­te­rial labour on the sets of Film City in Mumbai and in sweat­shops in Dharavi. Otolith II sur­veys and res­ur­rects the transtem­poral frag­ments of post-Independence mod­ernism via future-invoca­tive alliances between socialist fem­i­nism, Nehruvian sec­ular pro­jects and transna­tional sol­i­darity in order to assemble a pre­sent-day zodiac of the
pos­sible.
Otolith III inhabits the unre­alised poten­tial­i­ties of Satyajit Ray’s screen­play for The Alien, a film that was never made. Written in 1967, The Alien would have been the first science-fic­tion film to be set in con­tem­po­rary India. Otolith III returns to 1967 to pro­pose an alter­na­tive tra­jec­tory in which the fic­tional pro­tag­o­nists of The Alien con­front Ray and attempt to seize the means of pro­duc­tion in order to redeem their unfin­ished status. Reconfiguring visual and aural sequences from four­teen Ray’s films; drawingupon Jack Kirby’s visu­al­i­sa­tions for the unre­alised screen­play of Roger Zelazny’s novel Lord of Light (1967); and informed by the method­ology of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Appunti per un film sull’ India (1968), Otolith III coa­lesces into a ‘pre­make’ (an expres­sion bor­rowed from Chris Marker des­ig­nating a remake that is com­pleted before the orig­inal) of Ray’s film.
Scheduled to appear after the pro­jec­tion of Otolith I, the first in a series of three assem­blages designed for A Lure a Part Allure Apart revisits The Otolith Group’s Communists Like Us (2006). Conceived as notes towards Otolith II, Communists Like Us arranges a dia­logue between Soviet and Maoist del­e­ga­tion pho­tographs of
socialist inter­na­tion­alism, the sub­ti­tled con­ver­sa­tion between activist and philoso­pher Francis Jeanson and Véronique, his Maoist stu­dent, played by Anna Wiazemsky in La Chinoise (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967) and com­po­si­tions by Cornelius Cardew and Ennio Moricone.
In the first assem­blage, a sound mon­tage iso­lated from a sequence of Otolith II that com­pares wallet-making labour with work on an adver­tise­ment for finan­cial ser­vices, is brought into rela­tion with sub­ti­tles drawn from the dia­logue for La Chinoise. Acting as an alter­na­tive fore­word to Otolith II, this scrip­toaural assem­blage invites an encounter between the tem­po­ral­i­ties of com­mu­nist pro­jec­tions and the pre­car­i­ties of con­tem­po­rary indus­trial and imma­te­rial labour.
The second assem­blage, which begins after the con­clu­sion of Otolith II, is the audio-essay The Secret King in the Empire of Thinking (2011). Narrated by Anjalika Sagar, the essay is a redescrip­tion, set in an undated future, of Jack Kirby’s 1978 visu­al­i­sa­tions, com­mis­sioned for the unre­alised film Lord of Light, which was based on Roger Zelazny’s 1967 science-fic­tion novel Lord of Light. Made two years after the
release of Otolith III in which Kirby’s science-fic­tional illus­tra­tions played a sub­stan­tial role, The Secret King in the Empire of Thinking indi­cates The Group’s propen­sity to revisit their con­stel­la­tion of ref­er­ences so as to invoke the times and spaces of the revenant. The Secret King in the Empire of Thinking antic­i­pates the third assem­blage and pro­poses the final fold in the spa­tiotem­po­rality of the exhi­bi­tion.
Appearing after the con­clu­sion of Otolith III, a pro­jec­tion
announces a com­mis­sion by The Institute For The Extraterrestrial Cultures in 2014, enti­tled Protocol Division, Biohazard Facility For Visitation Sector 7, Quadrant 6, Naxalbari, Bengal. This insti­tu­tional fic­tion has trav­elled out­side its ini­tial appear­ance in Otolith III in order to provide a frame for the works of Jack Kirby and Vidya Sagar, which emerge in two des­ig­nated areas within the space of Bétonsalon, for the time of this assem­blage. Sagar’s seven pas­tels and Kirby’s ten pho­to­graphic prints are co-related with a series of pro­jected num­bers, imag­i­nary titles and prospec­tive dates, all of which operate to locate Sagar and Kirby’s works within the fic­tions of the exhi­bi­tion. By linking delayed mem­o­ries with antic­i­pated pres­ences and reordering scripts and sounds with images and voices, the scenog­raphy of A Lure A Part Allure Apart reveals itself to be the infernal cycle of an invo­luted uni­verse.

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