A conversation with Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar, members of the art collective The Otolith Group, will mark the conclusion of their Sharjah Art Foundation exhibition, Xenogenesis, on 5 February 2022. The artists will engage in a wide-ranging discussion with Elvira Dyangani Ose, curator and Director of Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), around the post-cinematic imagination of the prospect and rupture of the Pan-African project.
The conversation will focus on the cycle of works initiated by The Otolith Group in 2013 with the post-cinematic video, In the Year of the Quiet Sun, continuing with the installation Statecraft and concluding with the animation Sovereign Sisters (2014).
Taken individually, and in their entirety, these works constitute a biography of African modernity that envisions Pan-Africanism as a continental project of African futurism, viewed from a contemporary perspective of critical Afropessimism, as formulated by British art historian and writer Kobena Mercer in 2000.
This event is organised by Sharjah Art Foundation in collaboration with The Africa Institute.