The Otolith Group Presents 'What the Owl Knows': A Solo Exhibition of New Filmic Work

Secession presents 'What the Owl Knows,' a solo exhibition by The Otolith Group, featuring their new filmic work of the same title. The exhibition explores post-cinematic practices, the aesthetics of the essayistic, and the critique of capitalist and racialized anthropocenic catastrophes through artistic methods.

Secession is pleased to present the solo exhibition 'What the Owl Knows' by The Otolith Group, featuring their newly created filmic work of the same title. The post-cinematic practice of Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar is characterized by an attention to the aesthetics of the essayistic, taking the form of a "science fiction of the present" that seeks to dramatize the interscalar catastrophes of the racialized Capitalocene. Often, the artists' engagement with a reordering of intertemporal relations between past, present, and future draws on existing works by composers, producers, musicians, poets, theorists, and painters. Approaches to sound phenomena found in the works of Julius Eastman, Codona, Drexciya, Etel Adnan, Una Marson, and Rabindranath Tagore suggest a range of artistic methods for rethinking the power, mass, and movement of images. Hearing across media allows Eshun and Sagar to pursue and adopt a sonic practice of image-making that invites the audience to experience the present as a historical experience projected from the horizon of an anticipated future. In 'The Third Part of the Third Measure' (2017), for instance, The Otolith Group directs the temporal structure of the past by staging the music of composer Julius Eastman from the perspective of a future that confronts today's listeners with the militant figure of the gay guerrilla. 'What the Owl Knows' develops from the long-standing friendship between painter and writer Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Sagar, and Eshun. The admiration the three Londoners have for each other provides a prerequisite for a work that should honor the indirect affinities within, between, and beyond media. Traditional documentary formats and contemporary television, as well as modern museums and galleries, typically focus on the motives that drive the painter as a public figure in order to arrive at psychological insights. In contrast, it could be argued, Eshun and Sagar's work is driven by a desire to thwart the desire of institutions for biographical explanations. This persistent wish to foil institutional demands for explication reaches a certain crescendo in 'What the Owl Knows': the work is underpinned by the claim to shift the biographical imperative that shapes the stories of cinema's encounters with painting. Anyone who sees 'What the Owl Knows' will grasp the extent to which The Otolith Group endeavors not to exhibit the work of painting and to protect the presence of the painter from the exposure promised by the camera. The film aims to deconstruct the painterly work. It revels in what it does not reveal. It lingers on details, dwells on fragments, and works through the negative undertaking of decomposing the layers that accumulate in the process of composition. It observes Yiadom-Boakye as she observes individual segments of a canvas whose total scope eludes us, reflects on her next step, weighs the gravity of juxtaposed color qualities, and attentively perceives the shifting balance of hues. 'What the Owl Knows' is imbued with the ambition to shift the main focus away from the painter as an object of attention toward the quality of attention that the painter devotes to color. 'What the Owl Knows' strives for a poetics of recursion in which the viewer is made aware of how the digital video "pays attention" to how a painter "pays attention" to what she paints. The attention to the recursive resonates in a duet with a series of scenes in which Yiadom-Boakye appears as an isolated figure, a silhouette in the yellow light of streetlamps, unbound to the camera as it moves along wildnesses chosen for their specific but undisclosed meaning in the London cityscape. As Yiadom-Boakye reads from her poems, each reordered for and by the video, the restricted economy of an introspective expressionism increasingly determines the staging. The imperative of documentary cinema for explanations, it turns out, opens up an abyss of meaning that allows for an intensified state of premonition and allusion through the video's recourse to the divergent drama of poetic language. The oscillation between the intimacy of the studio interior and the drama of outdoor locations takes on the structure of a feeling whose interplay refers to the assembly power of the video medium. In its encounter between painting and poetry, the video's movement from day to night transfers Yiadom-Boakye's night thoughts from light to darkness and back again. To listen to the light of the night means to hear the night of the day. It means to sense the ceremony of the video medium, which convenes an assembly between the immortality of painting, the dead of poetry, and the life of the voice. The Otolith Group's attention to the shift in expectations is palpable in the vivid allegory that appears in the middle of 'What the Owl Knows.' In the animated fable between an owl and a dove, inspired by Eshun and Sagar's reading of Yiadom-Boakye's text 'Plans of the Night,' the dove can be read as a technician of its own decline, falling into its own trap.

Information about tickets for Secession exhibitions can be found via a provided link. General opening hours are Tuesday to Sunday, 10 AM to 6 PM, but specific exhibition ticketing details are not explicitly provided on this page beyond a general link to purchase tickets or access information.