Photo and Film: A Screening and Conversation with The Otolith Group

otolith

Wednesday, May 3, 7:30PM
Logan Center for the Arts, Screening Room 201
Photo and Film: A Screening and Conversation with The Otolith Group

The Otolith Group is an award wining United Kingdom based artist collective and organization founded by Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun in 2002. The Otolith Group explores the critical potential of images in contemporary society, with a particular interest in utopian histories, speculative fiction, and the politics of post-colonialism.

In conversation with not all realisms, the Smart Museum of Art screens the 2018 cinematic collage Nucleus of the Great Union. The film reimagines the digital afterlives of novelist Richard Wright’s photographs as he traveled throughout the Gold Coast (present day Ghana) where he witnessed Kwame Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party, West Africa’s first mass socialist party, as it campaigned for independence from British rule.

After the film screening, Anjalika Sagar, Kodwo Eshun, and not all realisms curator Leslie M. Wilson converse about the significance of the photograph in post-colonial West Africa and the ways in which Nucleus of the Great Union as a film invites us to consider Wright’s practice anew.

FREE, but space is limited. Registration information will be posted soon. 

About the film
Nucleus of the Great Union
The Otolith Group
2018
Duration: 32 mins, 35 seconds
Color
Sound: Stereo
Ratio: 16:9
HD Video

This program is co-presented by the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art, Logan Center for the Arts, and the Open Practice Committee in the Department of Visual Arts, in collaboration with Northwestern University’s Block Museum of Art and Climate Crisis + Media Arts Working Group