17–20 May 2007 / Utrecht
Dutch premiere, Thursday 17 May, 20:00
Introduction by the artists Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun
Screening times: Thursday 17 May, Friday 18 May, Saturday 19 May & Sunday 20 May, 15:00, 16:00, 17:00, 18:00, 19:00, 20:00 (45 min)
Entrance fee: 6 euro
Reservation: www.festivalaandewerf.nl
Otolith II is a new video by the Otolith Group.
The point of departure for this project is the archive of Anasuya Gyan-Chand, an educationalist and feminist active in the post-war milieu of trans-national activism. We see delegations of Indian feminists meeting women’s groups, visiting museums, hospitals, factories, laboratories, state gardens, attending conferences, summits and hearings, throughout China, Russia, Japan and Yugoslavia. At a time when the art world is engaged in re-examining the potentials and legacies of post-war feminist art practice, the work invites us to rethink the entanglements between feminism, communism and the Non Aligned Movement.
The Otolith Group’s long standing interest in the idea of the “past potential future” is focused around the poetics of moments such as this which allow them to rethink what it means to inhabit the present. Otolith II is informed by these broad concerns. The video focuses on the aftermath of the futures planned by the modernist of the mid century. It looks at the collapsed urbanism, the informal architectures and the pirate modernity of the slum, understood as the city of the future. In particular, it looks at the slums of Bombay as an unregulated architecture, the slum is typified by multiple incongruities and is a complex of improvisations that exceed survival and can be understood as a condition of becoming. Otolith II is an artistic exploration of these conditions.


