‘When we grew up, Luis Buñuel was on Channel 4’: the proudly highbrow Otolith Group

Watching the video art of the Otolith Group feels like a productive day spent in a university library, or a jump down a Wikipedia wormhole. Images, archive film and original footage filmed on a vast array of locations are collaged together into essayistic treatises on history, the environment, colonialism and lost utopian thinking. Tangents are unravelled and opaque connections are made. The nature of time is a recurring obsession.

Speaking to them ahead of their forthcoming exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art is no less an education. Their answers, like the work in the show, incorporate a rich tapestry of academic and literary quotations, poetry and lyrics. “We are nothing but that infinity of traces. It’s a Gramscian thing,” co-founder Kodwo Eshun says, referring to the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci. “And those traces show up as citations and quotations in our work. That’s how we think. It goes with the desire to socialise and to think more collectively. It puts us into a larger frame than the present.”

Eshun and Anjalika Sagar formed their partnership in 2002, their first film simply titled Otolith I. The 2three-minute work is set in the future, narrated by a fictional descendant of Sagar. It jumps through history, taking in the non-aligned and Tricontinental movements, the then-imminent Iraq war and Sagar’s late grandmother, who had been president of the National Federation of Indian Women. This confusion of chronology is deliberate, the pair say, describing it with a reference to writer JG Ballard as a “science fiction of the present”.

“We are interested in thinking about time vertically,” Sagar adds. “From the centre of the Earth to the cosmos, anything that allows us to think about histories that have never ended, or potential histories that haven’t unfolded because they were stopped.”

Their decision to work as a pair was a reaction to the individualism of the art world in the YBA era. “Forming a group was a strike against the idea of a single artist,” she says. “There was a sense that the YBA movement mirrored the breakdown of collectivism: this celebrity artist who revelled in posh dinners seemed so anti-punk to us. We also wanted to have an opaque name so people wouldn’t always ask us about racial identity – so we could talk about the work and not ourselves.”

An otolith is part of the inner ear, the word that appealed to Eshun, then a music writer, and Sagar, a musician. “It’s a displacement effect,” Eshun agrees. “We can talk about otoliths, and deviate from the more traditional questions and scenarios [in which] it is easy to find yourself positioned by well-meaning institutions.”

Their most recent work, Zone 2, made during the pandemic lockdown and released free online, incorporates footage of London’s Black Lives Matter protests, the legacy of the Windrush generation and a walk through a cemetery. “In the same way that the pandemic interrupted normal capitalism, it opened up another confrontation with mortality,” Sagar says. “That confrontation extends backwards and forwards in time. A crisis opens up a crack in time, a faultline.”

Their films often have an ominous or melancholic quality, an atmosphere that the pandemic must have only heightened. Sagar questions the idea. “When does the apocalypse begin? For people who were kidnapped and thrown into slavery, the apocalypse began then; when forms of deforestation started in the Amazon of the Indigenous people the apocalypse might have started then. There are many times in which we might enter the apocalypse.”

If the Otolith Group’s subject matter is often political, they insist much of their time is spent thinking formally. They try to approach film-making through the lens of different media. “We describe it as seeing in the key of listening,” Eshun says.

A 2017 film on Julius Eastman is a case in point. The three-part Third Part of the Third Measure plays out across two screens as four pianists play a score by the minimalist African American composer. “It’s about the two, the three and the four. Having six musical takes but recorded with three cameras,” Eshun says. “So you have 18 visual takes. It’s about making impossible work. The music became the guide for that work, but even when the sonic isn’t the subject of the work, we use it as a code to inform our film-making.”

This is all pretty highbrow stuff and occasionally their narration teeters on the impenetrable. How do they square that with the demands for accessibility in museums? “We don’t assume that people don’t understand,” Sagar says. “When we grew up, Luis Buñuel was on Channel 4. Endemol might have ruined television, but we reject this idea that people cannot understand complexity. That idea has become so present in the UK – it’s a classist assumption.”

“People enjoy the experience our films offer,” Eshun says. “We call it a ritual in temporal programming.”

“Deprogramming,” Sagar corrects.

“Programming, deprogramming and reprogramming,” Eshun counters. “That’s what video is. It’s an entity that invites you into the reprogramming of your neural networks or chrono-normative structures you’re forced to inhabit in your daily life. It invites you to a different relationship with time. A lot of people crave that, whether they have a language for it or not. But you don’t need a language, because it’s sensorial.”