Event
L’École du soir Cinéma #1 | Otolith II
Wednesday 18 October 2023
Screening with response by artist Rae-Yen Song
Screening
The Otolith Group, Otolith II (2007)
Duration: 48 minutes 42 seconds
SD video, colour, sound
Otolith II is set in the near future and mixes fiction, archival material and documentary footage filmed in Mumbai and Chandigarh. The film explores the affective pressure exerted upon inhabitants residing within contrasting and competing versions of the city of tomorrow. Otolith II investigates the politics of futurity in which predictive models of the masterplan, the corporate scenario and real estate speculation converge to extract labour, convert attention and capture potential for profit.
Schedule
5.45pm
Doors open
6pm
Intro: The Otolith Group (audio recording)
Screening: Otolith II (48 minutes 42 seconds)
Response by Rae-Yen Song
8pm
Doors close
Booking
The screening event is free and open to all. Book a ticket via Eventbrite.
The screening is raising funds for medical Aid for Palestinians, donate the cost of a cinema ticket or what you can directly to MAP.
QR code available at the event.
L’École du soir Cinéma
Inspired by Senegalese film director Ousmane Sembène’s concept of cinema as ‘night school’ or l’école du soir for collective study, Cooper Gallery will transform into a temporary cinema over four evenings of screenings of moving image by The Otolith Group. Each screening will be complemented by audio readings from The Otolith Group and responses from invited artists and writers in Scotland. These screenings from part of The Ignorant Art School Sit-in Curriculum #3.
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> More about the exhibition
Biographies
Rae-Yen Song (b. 1993, Scotland, based in Glasgow) works expansively across mediums, including drawing, sculpture, installation, costume, video, sound, performance, and family collaboration. Song’s work explores self-mythologising as a survival tactic: using fantasy and fabulation to establish a richly visual world-building practice informed by autobiography, ancestral journeys, Taoist philosophy, family ritual, multi-species interdependency, and science fiction. For Song, world-building becomes a tool for imaginative self-definition, with familial logics becoming the foundations of an alternative reality untethered from linear conceptions of space and time. It allows Song to resist colonial tropes and conventions, crafting multidimensional personal records and offerings for the future. These narratives yield a mix of humour, empathy and absurdity, whilst speaking broadly and politically about foreignness, identity, survival and what it means to belong ― or not.
The Otolith Group is an award-winning artist led collective founded by Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun in 2002.
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.
Approaching curation as an artistic practice of building intergenerational and cross-cultural platforms, the collective has been influential in critically introducing particular works of artists such as Chris Marker, Harun Farocki, Anand Patwardhan, Etel Adnan, Black Audio Film Collective, Sue Clayton, Mani Kaul, Peter Watkins, and Chimurenga in the UK, US, Europe, and Lebanon.
Access
The gallery is on two floors. First floor has ramped access and disabled toilet.
Second floor is accessible via lift and for wheelchair access via a stairclimber. The screening will take place on the second floor.
Please email in advance if you require lift or stairclimber access so we can arrange support.
Large print versions of the exhibition information handout are available, please ask our Guides.
All enquiries please contact: exhibitions@dundee.ac.uk
Image credit
The Otolith Group, Otolith II, 2007 (video still)
Courtesy the artist and LUX.
Funding support
The Ignorant Art School at Cooper Gallery, DJCAD is supported by the National Lottery through Creative Scotland.
Cooper Gallery
Exhibitions@dundee.ac.uk