Lie To Me

The Otolith Group tells ZEHRA JUMABHOY how fact, fiction and falsehood share space in its films.

The Otolith Group. Otolith III. HD colour video with sound. 48 minutes. 2009.
ALL IMAGES COURTESY THE OTOLITH GROUP/ EXPERIMENTER, KOLKATA.

"Filmmaking is an inherently collective practice, whether you admit it or not,” maintains British-Ghanaian writer Kodwo Eshun, one of two members of The Otolith Group. The other is the London-born Anjalika Sagar. Once, they were three and included artist Richard Couzins in their faction, but lately Eshun and Sagar have been going it alone. Well, sort of. Usha Adebaran-Sagar, a fictional descendent of the ‘real’ Sagar from the 22^nd century, also joins their struggle against injustice. The Hackney-based group was founded in 2002, on the eve of Britain and America making war with Iraq. They united to protest against this invasion, which rode roughshod over public sentiment. So, their first film, Otolith I (2003), tracks anti-war demonstrations across London, interweaving this footage with futuristic commentary (Adebaran-Sagar makes her presence felt) and archival images from South Asia and the USSR. The Group’s cavalier attitude to chronology has become its hallmark. ‘Otoliths’, after all, are the micro-crystals in our ears responsible for our sense of balance. Disturb them, and we feel unstable. Which, of course, is just what The Group desires: to disorientate viewers so that we re-think our allegiance to capitalism.

Naturally, The Group is not the first to voice such worthy aspirations: Raqs Media Collective, CAMP and the Desire Machine Collective all vie for a chance to overthrow the tyranny of “global capital flows”. And like many others who have been identified with the videocum- film-meets-documentary scene, the Otoliths fit snugly into this tradition of image-rich revolt. “We see ourselves as part of the artistic turn towards experimentation with documentary,” Eshun humbly admits, adding, “A work has a certain agency of its own.” The collective’s activities include conducting workshops, curating and writing. Luckily, The Group – at least the duo is not calling itself ‘The Borg’ – is more aware of its complicated position than many others. Eshun and Sagar argue that the way they produce (i.e. ‘collectively’) and present (i.e. trickily) is vital to their subversive quest. Hence, their films – saturated with nostalgiasoaked voice-overs, archival footage and futurist sci-fi references – are deliberately timeconsuming: “For our videos, the second time is the first time, you need to see them twice.” The Inner Time of Television (2007), a re-presentation of Chris Marker’s 1989 TV series, The Owl’s Legacy, was screened on 13 monitors at Tate Britain in 2010.

Visitors were invited to watch at their leisure – all 6 episodes of it. Otolith III (2009) often assumes the form of a movie. It is not looped, and there is an intermission between each screening, forcing viewers to wait for it to begin. (Once it does, we are impatient for it to end.)

The Otolith Group. Installation view of In the year 2013 at Experimenter,
Kolkata (17th of December 2010 - 8th of January 2011).

But this is not a bad thing, according to Eshun, for whom generating extreme boredom is a tactic. “Our videos can be quite un-pleasurable. I think boredom can be the irritation that gives birth to the new,” he says optimistically. The fact that The Group exhibits regularly at prestigious international venues – London’s Tate Britain (by whom they were shortlisted for the 2010 Turner Prize) and Manifesta 8 in Murcia (2010), among others – does not detract from its struggle to beat the system. In the midst of glitzy installations – think of the survey shows of Indian art the collective has contributed to – it stages its low-key rebellion. If this ‘revolt’ necessitates a great deal of hard work on the part of the viewer, Eshun and Sagar would be the last to balk at such consequences. Eshun is not lauding ennui – which is redolent of the dull, repetitive activity that Karl Marx (and Walter Benjamin after him) saw as endemic to capitalism’s factory-unit style of production. No, The Group’s films aspire to another sort of tedium. One that forces us to think. Certainly, Nervus Rerum (2008) tests our powers of concentration. Focusing on the Jenin refugee camp in the Palestinian Occupied Territories, the 32- minute video is shot with a handheld camera. We have occasional interface with the Palestinians living behind their graffiti-marked walls, enough to worry about being yet another invasion of their privacy. However, there are none of the question-and-answer sessions we expect when reporters find their way into Palestine. Instead, a voice (Sagar’s dulcet cadences) waxes poetic about “the image”, memory and loss.