The British Council in collaboration with Dhaka Art Summit 2020 and Goethe-Institut Bangladesh presented the Bangladesh Premier of ‘INFINITY minus Infinity’ by the Otolith Group on 3 February 2020 at 06.00 p.m. at the Goethe-Institut auditorium in Dhaka.
The Otolith Group was founded in 2002 and consists of Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun who live and work in London.
During their longstanding collaboration The Group have drawn from a wide range of resources and materials. Their work is research based and spans the moving image, audio, performance, installation, and curation.
They incorporate film making and post-lens-based essayistic aesthetics that explore the temporal anomalies, anthropic inversions, and synthetic alienation of the posthuman, the inhuman, the non-human, and the complexity of the environmental conditions of life we all face.
Expanding on the work of The Otolith Group is their curatorial public platform The Otolith Collective. On this platform programming, exhibition-making, artists’ writing, workshops, publication, and teaching are aimed at developing close readings of images and sounds in contemporary society.
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.
In INFINITY minus Infinity, Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun of The Otolith Group brought together dance, music, recital and digital animation to compose a trans-historical zone in which the unpayable debts of racial capitalism cannot be separated from the ongoing crimes of climate catastrophe. INFINITY minus Infinity enacts the durational timelines of past distress, present duress and future dread through the assembly of a chorus of deities whose expressions, gestures and movements personify the compounded times and spaces of the hostile environment.
The film screening was attended by Teresa Albor, Director of Cultural Affairs, Samdani Art Foundation. Followed by the screening there was a discussion with Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun of The Otolith Group. The audiences participated in an interactive session where they got to know the insights of film making and more about The Otolith Group.
