Founded by Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar in London in 2002, the Otolith Group have researched and produced densely textured moving images works, installations, photographs, murals and performances, which frequently reference the trajectories of the non-aligned, and the transnational legacies of the global majority and it's diasporas.
Their works have been commissioned and presented by museums, galleries, biennials, and foundations worldwide.
Recent monographic exhibitions include: MASCON A Massive Concentration of Black Experiential Energy and MASCON A Massive Concentration of Black Interscalar Energy across Chicago as part of Project A Black Planet at the ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO and the NEUBAUER COLLEGIUM, at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, Italy (2024); Secession in Vienna (2022); and the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin (2022).
As curators and theorists The Otolith Collective have engaged in the conception, creation and convening of platforms that make public the research that informs their artistic, theoretical and curatorial practice.
Throughout this practice runs a precoccupation with shifting the decolonial form of the essayistic towards an untimely institution, drawn from thinking temporality as unbound by the political formations that determine the notion of the contemporary.
From this aesthetico-political process emerges a practice of platforming, a practice that draws attention to the urgency of the present in all of its provincial, provisional, prospective and planetary dimensions.
It is the urgency of the Now that animates and has animated the Collective’s presentation of the work of Bahar Noorizadeh, Chris Marker, Harun Farocki, Anand Patwardhan, Etel Adnan, Fred Moten, Eyal Sivan, Black Audio Film Collective, Peter Watkins, Sue Clayton, Mark Fisher and Justin Barton, Silvia Maglioni & Graeme Thomson, Lamia Joreige, Naeem Mohaiemen, Chimurenga Library, Emma Wolukau-Wanamba, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, Lungiswa Gqunta, Tony Cokes, Rania Stephan, Ayo Akingbade and Rehana Zaman to name but a few, throughout and beyond the UK.
What unites the Collective’s practice of platforming is the necessity to bring viewers face to face with the force of images and the unnameability of sounds so as to create the conditions for intervention in the colonised times and racialised spaces of our catastrophic present.
The Otolith Collective Advisory Board Members
Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe are otherwise known as Cooking Sections. They are spatial practitioners based in London who use installation, performance, mapping and video, to explore the systems that organise the world through food.
Lynette Yiadom Boakye is an artist who creates fictional figures that are untethered to a specific time or place, and are born from various untraceable subjects: people, objects, thoughts, photographs, or images she has drawn, observed, or recalled. This lack of fixed narrative reference leaves her work open to the projected imagination of the viewer. Her paintings are rooted in traditional formal considerations such as line, color, and scale, and can be self-reflexive about the medium itself, but the subjects and the way in which the paint is handled is decidedly contemporary. When describing her painting and writing, Yiadom-Boakye derives each practice from the language of poetry—a fiction imbued with reality and truth. Merging the visual and textual, her titles function as another mark beside the painting that, like her figures, need not describe, explain, or justify. She is also trustee at the Serpentine Gallery.
Julie Lomax is chief executive officer of a-n The Artists Information. She previously worked as the Director of Development at Liverpool Biennial, Director of Visual Arts at Australia Council for the Arts, and as Director of Visual Arts for Arts Council England. She is also currently the chair of The Showroom, as well as on AWITA’s Executive Committee.
Grant Watson is an independent curator, writer and artist. Grant Watson’s interview project How We Behave (2012–ongoing) explores queer ascesis, as a personal and a collective politics.
His work has been shown at Extra City, Antwerp, 2017; Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2017; State of Concept, Athens, 2016; Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, 2015; The Showroom, London, 2015; and If I Can’t Dance, Amsterdam, 2014. He has curated projects with Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 2019; Lunds Konsthal, Dublin, 2014; nGbK, Berlin, 2014; Tate Liverpool, Liverpool, 2014; Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, 2013; among others.
Dr. Grant Watson was Co-Artistic Director of ‘bauhaus imaginista’ (2016–2019) along with Marion von Osten, has held numerous curatorial positions, and has been Tutor at the Royal College of Art, London, since 2015 and has been involved with the Dutch Art Institute since 2012. He has a PhD in Visual Cultures from Goldsmiths University of London, London. Watson lives and works in London.
Ian Sen is a Barrister whom has worked for over 30 years in Criminal Law and Human Rights.
Previous members of the board include: Dr Andrea Philips, John Akomfrah, Eyal Weizman and Emily Pethick. These former members remain as friends, advisors and fellow thinkers at large for the Group and the Collective.