Kodwo Eshun

tags: Nanjing, London

Kodwo Eshun is a filmmaker, theorist and artist, based in London. He is Lecturer in Contemporary Art Theory at Goldsmiths, Department of Visual Cultures, University of London and Professor of Visual Arts at Haut Ecole d’Art et Design, Genève.

In 2002, he founded The Otolith Group together with Anjalika Sagar. Their essayistic approach reflects on the perception and nature of documentary practice through films, texts and activities related to media archives. From Cold War ideology to global capitalism processes, recent history appears as fragments of a personal diary which, in turn, could be fiction.

The Otolith Group has grown as a collaborative platform that seeks to rethink the dynamics of cultural production under conditions of accelerated, unstable and precarious global conditions. Films, art works, exhibitions, curated programmes, and publications are collectively conceived, and research forms the basis of the practice. The Otolith Group were nominated for The Turner Prize in 2010 and have exhibited internationally since 2003.

http://otolithgroup.org/

Kodwo is author of More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction, Verso, Second Edition, 2020, and Dan Graham: Rock My Religion, Afterall, 2012, co-editor of The Fisher Function, 2017, Post Punk Then and Now, 2016, The Militant Image: A Cine-Geography: Third Text Vol 25 Issue, 2011, Harun Farocki Against What? Against Whom, 2010 and The Ghosts of Songs: The Film Art of the Black Audio Film Collective 1982–1998, 2007.

The Otolith Group@ DAI:

We have been teaming up, off and on, since 2002. In 2004 Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar participated in the DAI-NAI project which brought all DAI-students, staff and tutors to Nanjing in the P.R. of China for an extensive, 6-week long collaboration with the Nanjing Art Institute. In the following years The Otolith Group returned to DAI at numerous occasions, as respondents to Kitchen presentations, guest-lecturers or project leaders, amongst others:

2013 - 2014 'TO MAKE A WORK - Motivation, Affinity, Circumstance': DAI at art school Kala Bhavan in Santiniketan.

2014-2015 CINÉTRACTS BY OTHER MEANS: NOTES FROM TEHRAN,