The Otolith Group artist-led collective was founded by two artists and theorists, Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun in 2002. The collective researches and works across archive, sound, moving image, audio, text, performance, installation, and curation, using the latter as a vehicle for building intergenerational and cross-cultural platforms. Critically supporting artists in the UK, USA, Europe, and Lebanon, and exhibiting widely, Otolith projects operate at a crossing point between contemporary art exhibition and visual culture; the Group was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2010.
The Otolith Group, an artist-led collective, was founded by London-born artists and theorists Anjalika Sagar and British-Ghanaian, Kodwo Eshun in 2002, who had studied, respectively at Southampton University and the University of Oxford; and SOAS, University of London. The name 'Otolith' refers to an anatomical entity, a tiny calcium carbonate structure located in the inner ear, which helps to maintain the body's equilibrium and head-eye-body balance. The Group's research-based outputs include films, art works, exhibitions, curated programmes, and publications, which are conceived by the two founders. The wider Otolith Collective supports the critical presentation of artists' work, at a crossing point between visual culture and contemporary art exhibiting. Diverse essay film-based projects include the touring exhibition The Ghosts of Songs: A Retrospective of The Black Audio Film Collective 1982-1998 (2007); the touring film programme Protest (2008), conceived as part of Essentials: The Secret Masterpieces of Cinema commissioned by the Independent Cinema Office; Tate Modern's Harun Farocki, 22 Films: 1968-2009 (2009); The Journey by Peter Watkins (2013); A Cinema of Songs and People: The Films of Anand Patwardhan (2013); and On Vanishing Land by Mark Fisher and Justin Barton at The Showroom (2013). In 2006 the Group featured in two important surveys, How to Improve the World: 60 Years of British Art, Hayward Gallery and the Tate Triennial, Tate Britain. In 2010 The Otolith Group were nominated for the Turner Prize.
The Group has featured in/presented exhibitions and projects in many venues across the UK, including the Hayward Gallery, Lisson Gallery, Tate Britain, Tate Modern and the Serpentine Gallery in London, and at Nottingham Contemporary, while the list of publication outputs is extensive, encompassing critical texts in academic publications, periodicals, exhibition catalogues and monographs. The Otolith Group's solo exhibition Xenogenesis was presented at Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands in 2019, and is scheduled to tour to the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin in 2022, while the Group has been represented in Life Between Islands: Caribbean-British Art 1950s-Now, Tate Britain (2021-22). The Otolith Group founder members live and work in London, England and the Group's work is represented in UK public collections including the Arts Council Collection and the Irish Museum of Modern Art.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Otolith Group]
Publications related to [Otolith Group] in the Ben Uri Library