The Otolith Group with Denise Ferreira da Silva: Screening and Conversation

The Franklin Humanities Institute’s Climate Change, Decolonization, and Global Blackness Lab presents a screening of two video works, Infinity Minus Infinity (The Otolith Group, 2019, 57 min, UK, Digital) and In the Year of the Quiet Sun (The Otolith Group, 2013, 34 min, UK, Digital). The screening will be followed by a staged conversation between the artists and Professor Denise Ferreira da Silva (Univ. of British Columbia) to follow.

The Otolith Group was founded in 2002 by artists Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun. Their moving image, audio works, performances and installations are characterized by an engagement with the legacies and potentialities of diasporic futurisms that explore modes of temporal anomalies, anthropic inversions and synthetic alienation. The presented works and staged conversation aims to interweave The Otolith Group’s practice in relation to the critical themes of the FHI Lab, analyzing ongoing climate catastrophe through the context of empire and the forms of racialization central to global capitalism, which includes the degradation of peoples, ecosystems and lands facilitated by states in the global North.

The Otolith Group’s recent solo exhibitions include A Sphere of Water Orbiting A Star, Hangar (2023), Galway Arts Centre (2023); What the Owl Knows, Secession, Austria (2022-2023); Xenogenesis, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2022-2023); Sharjah Art Foundation (2021-22) SAAG (2020), Buxton Art Gallery, Melbourne (2020), ICA, Virginia (2020), Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven (2019); O Horizon, The Rubin Museum of Art, New York (2018); Reconstruction of Story 2, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (2018);  The Radiant, Art Gallery at Miyauch, Japan (2017); In the Year of the Quiet Sun at CASCO, Utrecht (2014); Novaya Zemlya at Museo Serralves, Porto (2014); and Medium Earth, Roy and Edna Disney at Cal Arts Theater, Los Angeles (2013).

An academic, artist and filmmaker, the work of Denise Ferreira da Silva, Ph.D., addresses the ethico-political challenges of the global present. She is the author of Toward a Global Idea of Race (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), A Dívida Impagavel (OIP and Living Commons, 2019), Unpayable Debt (Stenberg 2022), Homo Modernus (Cobogó, 2022), and co-editor (with Paula Chakravartty) of Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013).

Directed by Duke Professor Michaeline Crichlow (African and African American Studies) in collaboration with Professor Denise Ferreira da Silva (University of British Columbia), the Climate Change, Decolonization, and Global Blackness Lab was launched in Fall 2022 as part of a larger project at the FHI on the entanglement of race, health and climate.

Co-sponsored by Duke Cinematic Arts.