09.26.2020 | 11.15.2020
XENOGENESIS | THE OTOLITH GROUP
Xenogenesis is the first large scale exhibition of The Otolith Group presented in Canada, as part of an international exhibition tour organized by the Vanabbemuseum in Eindhoven, NL; the exhibition will include artworks produced between 2011 and 2018. The collective was founded by artist Anjalika Sagar and theorist Kodwo Eshun in 2002.
Xenogenesis is named after Octavia Butlers’ Xenogenesis Trilogy, which consists of Dawn. Xenogenesis: 1, Adulthood Rites. Xenogenesis: 2, and Imago. Xenogenesis: 3. As a pioneering African American female science fiction novelist, Butlers’ award-winning novels investigated questions of human extinction, racial distinction, planetary transformation, enforced mutation, generative alienation and altered kinship. From her first novel Patternmaster, 1976, to her final novel Fledgling, 2005, Butler challenged the questions of science fiction in ways that transformed the cultural imagination of futurity for generations of feminist thinkers, artists and philosophers from Donna Haraway to Denise Ferreira da Silva to the Black Quantum Futurists. Butlers’ fictions of xenogenesis, which are narrated as processes of alien becoming or becoming alien, have informed and continue to inform the movement of thought of The Otolith Group’s work.
Curated by Annie Fletcher
The exhibition was first shown at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, NL; copyright of the concept of the exhibition is attributed to the VAM. Exhibition Architecture by Diogo Passarinho Studio.
The Otolith Group was founded in 2002 and consists of Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun who live and work in London. During their collaboration The Group have drawn from a wide range of resources and materials; their research-based work spans moving image, audio, performance, installation, and curation. The Otolith Group incorporates film making and post-lens-based essayistic aesthetics that explore the temporal anomalies, anthropic inversions, and synthetic alienation of the posthuman, the inhuman, the non-human, and the complexity of the environmental conditions of life we all face. In 2010 The Otolith Group were nominated for the Turner Prize.
The Otolith Group, Sovereign Sisters, computer animation transferred to HD video (film still), 2014.
Courtesy and copyright of the artists.
