A Flock Of Keen-eyed and Far Seeing Magpies
15.09.2025 - 06.09.2026
The Otolith Library in Residence at Ibraaz, London
The Otolith Library in Residence is an interscalar vehicle for navigating the conditions of existence of the present.
The Library constitutes a cross-section of the journals, books, periodicals, pamphlets, singles, DVDs, CDs, VHSs and catalogues assembled throughout the research and development of artworks and programmes by The Otolith Group, Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun, since 2002.
These collections emerge from the informal, independent, intercontinental, ongoing study program entailed by the Group’s contemporary integrated practice that combines Brenezian visual study with Motenian black study under the imperatives and impulses of platformalism.
A Flock Of Keen-eyed and Far Seeing Magpies transposes The Otolith Group’s studio library space into the form and medium of a public library by reorienting the migratory orbit of materials around the installation.
The conception, design and fabrication of bookshelves and tables redirects the idyll of artistic residence towards the political education of artistic theories and the artistic practice of political theories; towards a point at which people at the intersections of discplines meet to coordinate tactics and strategies for interrupting and interrogating the environmental hostilities of the present.
Contemplative Dialogues, Key Note Lectures, Reading groups, Study days, Concerts and Screenings taking place throughout the building at Ibraaz constitute a year long series of Library Transmissions that aim at the nerve of things.
Title is thanks to Ed Halter of Light Industry for the formulation. See Ed Halter, Today, in a Hundred Years, Artforum May 2022, Vol. 60, No. 9.
'Interscalar Vehicle' - Gabrielle Hecht, Interscalar Vehicles for an African Anthropocene: On Waste, Temporality and Violence, Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 33 Issue 1, 2018, 109-141.
'Brenezian Study' - Theorised by Nicole Brenez as ‘a study of the image by means of image itself’. See Nicole Brenez, Harun Farocki and the Romantic Genesis of the Principle of Visual Critique’, in Harun Farocki: Against What? Against Whom? eds. Antje Ehmann and Kodwo Eshun, Koenig Books Raven Row, 2010, 129, and Nicole Brenez, On the Figure in General and the Body in Particular: Figurative Invention in Cinema, trans. Ted Fendt, Anthem Press, 2023, 149-170.
'Motenian' - See Fred Moten & Stefano Harney, The General Antagonism: An Interview with Stevphen Shukaitis in Fred Moten & Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, Minor Compositions, 2013, 110-111.
'Platformalism' -Theorised as experiments in formalism enabled by digital platforms. See Kodwo Eshun, Statecraft: An Independent Timeline of Independence determined by Digital Auction in Megs Morley, Kodwo Eshun, Anjalika Sagar (eds.) Xenogenesis: The Otolith Group, Irish Museum of Modern Art and Archive Books, 2021,223-233.
'The Nerve of Things' A translation of the title of Nervus Rerum, 2009, by The Otolith Group.
