British-born artists Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar of The Otolith Group speak about their films, installations and performances. They discuss their frequent reworking of archival and contemporary images and the way in which it straddles the border between truth and fiction, complicating divisions between poetry, history, the real, and the imagined.
This is a public programme of No Country: Contemporary for South and Southeast Asia.]]>The Eye of Silence is a newly commissioned video marshalling high atmospheric footage of the Albertan Badlands, the Utah Salt Flats, Icelandic and Japanese volcanoes, and a meteorite crater and cave paintings located within a region of the Namibian desert long closed off to visitors because of diamond mining. A field of stars becomes a point map of a lidar scan of a cave. At every polarity, the suggestion of a mystical inversion obtains, wherein a horizon or vanishing point unfolds to offer new vistas. An abyss, such as outer space, or some geological fissure, delivers a new world. Combining static camera, drone footage, and a mirrored screen, a churning mass of clouds, lava, and stone provides receptive viewers with ample grounds to project their own associations. Is that a face in the mist? In such moments, another antinomy is revealed—between subject and object; evidence and speculation. The Eye of Silence both depicts and implies metamorphosis on every level.
Mediating between stellar and subterranean motifs, fog, mist, clouds and smoke venting from a fresh lava flow spill across the screen. At times it softens tough terrain, while elsewhere stimulating a trance-like pareidolia, or roiling within volcanic craters. The visual dynamism of air recapitulates not only the ‘invention of the concept of atmosphere in the history of meteorology,’ but also the formation of the earth’s atmosphere back in deep geologic time—in a word, to creation itself. The Eye of Silence calls forth otherworldly experience from within the depths and heights of this world, at the same time cultivating an aesthetic disposition to receive them.
An introduction to the work will be given by the artist himself. The screening will be followed by a conversation between Charles Stankievech and Professor Ute Meta Bauer.
The Eye of Silence is a film by Charles Stankievech
Producer: Ala Roushan
Produced by The VEGA Foundation
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VR Installation
Tuesday to Sunday, 12 - 7 pm
Fridays, 12 - 9 pm
Blk 38, Malan Road #01-07 Gillman Barracks
An early experiment with virtual reality technologies, Phantom (kingdom of all the animals and all the beasts is my name) allows viewers to immerse themselves in
the Brazilian Mata Atlántica rainforest, one of the fastest disappearing ecosystems today. Upon wearing the headset, the viewer is enwrapped in the lush density of the forest. Foliage and plants, aerial and ground roots, intricate tree canopies and a thick understory dematerialise into a spectral environment made of point cloud renderings, complex constellations of greyscale dots that evolve in response to the viewer’s movements. Since the human body is not translated in the digital rendering, viewers are likely to experience a paradoxical sense of disembodiment inside a space that can only be navigated through corporeal movement. In its performative aspect, Phantom also complicates conventional modes of spectatorship: with only a single headset available, the viewer becomes a subject of display for the other visitors.
Part of Free Jazz IV. Geomancers