Event
L’École du soir Cinéma #3 | In the Year of the Quiet Sun
Wednesday 15 November 2023
Screening with artist response from Anne-Marie Copestake (In-person)
Screening
The Otolith Group, In the Year of the Quiet Sun (2013)
Duration: 33 minutes 57 seconds
HD video, colour, stereo sound
This video essay takes its name from the solar phenomenon that occurs every eleven years when the sun’s surface cools enough to allow observatories to study solar activity. From November 1964 to November 1965, the countries of the world, including many newly independent African states, issued stamps to commemorate the first scientific expedition to study the surface of the sun.
As these stamps turned their face towards the sun, they overlooked the instability on the ground in Africa’s newly independent states: the military coups planned by soldiers against the governments of Nigeria and Ghana, the popular and murderous uprisings in Zanzibar, the crisis of sovereignty in the Congo instigated by the Force Publique, sustained by Union Miniere de haut Katanga and worsened by the intervention of the United Nations.
In this work, the astronomical time of the quiet sun converges with the political calendar of conferences that took place in cities such as Bandung, Cairo, Belgrade, Accra, Addis Ababa, Saniquelle and Casablanca throughout the 1950s and 1960s, when politicians, activists and journalists gathered to debate and plan the continental programme of Pan Africanist policy.
In the Year of the Quiet Sun focuses on magnified details of postage stamps generating scenes that allude, often indirectly, to the making and the unmaking of polity on a continental scale.
Schedule
5.45pm
Doors open
6pm
Intro: The Otolith Group (audio recording)
Screening: In the Year of the Quiet Sun (33 minutes 57 seconds)
Artist response by Anne-Marie Copestake
Exhibition viewing
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.
> View all events
> More about the exhibition
Biographies
Anne-Marie Copestake lives in Glasgow, working with moving image, sound, sculpture, print and performance. Attentive to temporary and longer term communities, narrative and emotion, her work is concerned with entangled social political conditions surrounding individual and collective choices, or a lack of choices, and an exploration of environments that may contribute essentially to these conditions. She often works collaboratively, most recently with musician Ailbhe Nic Oireachtaigh.
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, In the Year of the Quiet Sun, 2013 (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