The Otolith Group
Zoom: The Third Part of the Third Measure
, 20:00
Free and open for all.
From the late 1960s until his death in 1990 at the age of 50, Julius Eastman, the queer African-American avant-garde composer, pianist, vocalist and conductor wrote and performed compositions whose ecstatic militant minimalism initiated a black radical aesthetic that revolutionized the East Coast new music scene of the 1970s and 1980s. No recordings of Eastman’s compositions were released during his lifetime.
In January 1980, Julius Eastman was invited by the Music Department at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, to present his compositions Crazy Nigger (1978), Evil Nigger (1979), and Gay Guerrilla (1979) at the Pick-Staiger Concert Hall. A number of African-American students and one faculty member at Northwestern University objected to the titles of Eastman’s compositions. The titles of Eastman’s compositions were redacted from the concert programme printed by the Music Department. Before the concert, on 16 January 1980, Eastman delivered a public statement that responded to these objections.
The speeches delivered by Dante Micheaux and Elaine Mitchener in “The Third Part of the Third Measure” are based on each performer’s modified verbatim transcriptions of Eastman’s Northwestern University statement.
The Otolith Group
The Otolith Group was founded in 2002 and consists of Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun who live and work in London.
During their longstanding collaboration The Group have drawn from a wide range of resources and materials.
Their work is research based and spans the moving image, audio, performance, installation, and curation.
They incorporate film making and post-lens-based essayistic aesthetics that explore the temporal anomalies, anthropic inversions, and synthetic alienation of the posthuman, the inhuman, the non-human, and the complexity of the environmental conditions of life we all face.
Expanding on the work of The Otolith Group is the curatorial public platform The Otolith Collective. On this platform programming, exhibition-making, artists’ writing, workshops, publication, and teaching are aimed at developing close readings of images and sounds in contemporary society.
Approaching curation as an artistic practice of building intergenerational and cross-cultural platforms, the collective has been influential in critically introducing particular works of artists such as Chris Marker, Harun Farocki, Anand Patwardhan, Etel Adnan, Black Audio Film Collective, Sue Clayton, Mani Kaul, Peter Watkins, and Chimurenga in the UK, US, Europe, and Lebanon.
In 2010 The Otolith Group were nominated for the Turner Prize.
Zoom is Bergen Kunsthall´s new series presenting screenings and live events with artists and filmmakers whose work lies in-between contemporary art and cinema. This season we present films that share a focus on social activism and collective practise, and explore the intersections between documentary and fiction, watching and listening, withdrawal and exposure.