The Otolith Group: Xenogenesis Talks Programme

Talk Descriptions

3:15 pm—4:15 pm

Visions of the Future, Speculations on the Present: Thinking with Octavia Butler

To accompany Xenogenesis, The Otolith Group’s exhibition at the Sharjah Art Foundation from 13 November 2021 to 5 February 2022, the members of the art collective, Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar, invite critics and artists to engage in close readings of Octavia Butler’s science fictions. Butler’s term, Xenogenesis, inspires the title of the exhibition and informs the idea of an ongoing programme of conversations titled DXG, or the Department of Xenogenesis. In the first iteration of DXG, Sagar and Eshun reflect on Butler’s far reaching speculative fictions. To engage with the author’s black feminist imagination of the denaturalisation of the human is to stay with a series of thought experiments in pitiless speculation that require attention to what Denise Ferreira da Silva calls a black feminist poethics at the end of the world. DXG is supported by IMMA – Irish Museum of Modern Art.

4:30 pm—5:30 pm

Xenogenesis: A Conversation with The Otolith Group

Suspended between a science fiction of the present, contemporary theory, avant garde poetry and essayistic documentary, the post-cinematic aesthetics of The Otolith Group dramatise the temporal anomalies and categorical confusions engendered by the Racial Capitalocene. Xenogenesis curator Annie Fletcher, Director of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, and writer and editor Ciarán Finlayson join Sagar and Eshun to discuss the works included in the exhibition that range from Anathema (2011) to O Horizon (2018). The conversation will be followed by the launch of Xenogenesis: The Otolith Group, a polyphonic publication designed by Luca Frei that presents the works featured in the exhibition and explores The Otolith Group’s artistic practice through the contributions of Annie Fletcher, Mark Fisher, Denise Ferreira da Silva, George Lewis, Vivian Ziherl, Grant Watson, Shanay Jhaveri, Anselm Franke and Mahan Moalemi.

Registration

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This event is free and open to the public, but prior registration is encouraged as places are limited.

COVID-19 safety measures

Please note that in line with government health and safety guidelines, visitors are required to wear masks during visits to the exhibition spaces and keep a safe distance from others at all times. Audience capacity at the venue will be limited to ensure adherence to social distancing rules and seating will be arranged accordingly.