7 pm
Free
seats allocated on a first-come-first-served basis
Location:
The Nehru Centre,
8 South Audley Street,
London W1K 1HF
The Otolith Group creates art works, curates exhibitions, programmes events and designs platforms for discussion of contemporary artistic practice. In Communists Like Us, 2006, a slide presentation delivered by the Group’s members, Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun, spins a rich historical web prompted by Sagar’s grandmother’s voyage to Mao’s China. Photographs of the journey are transposed with subtitles from Godard’s 1967 film La Chinoise, a transcultural exchange that intertwines the postcolonial and the postmodern.
The Otolith Group will be exhibiting at Gasworks and The Showroom, London, in 2009.
Communists Like Us will be presented in London for the first time as part of the Indian Highway Public Programme in February 2009. The performance will also mark the first of 11 events that will run alongside A Long Time Between Suns, The Otolith Group's first solo exhibition in the UK, which will open at Gasworks in February and at The Showroom in May 2009.
Communists Like Us constitutes elements from the group's universe of materials, which have been configured in the form of a hypothetical 30-minute trailer for a new photo essay film in development.
The Otolith Group explores the potentiality of a 16-minute scene from Jean Luc Godard's 1967 film La Chinoise. In this scene, filmed as an uninterrupted train journey, the indexical figure of activist turned philosopher Francis Jeanson argues with the fictional character of Veronique, a young Maoist student, played by Anne Wiasemsky. The dialogue from the scene has been transcribed onto the recto and the verso of archival photographs thereby creating a contrapuntal conversation between photography and cinema. At the same time, different moments from the discrepant engagements with Maoism have been brought into dialogue with each other. This differential reception is complicated by the projection of propaganda posters from the Cultural Revolution and the replaying of Paragraph II of The Great Learning as performed by The Scratch Orchestra and composed by Cornelius Cardew in 1970. This composition has been chosen for the ways in which it enacts a practice of radical democracy through collective musical practice while simultaneously being a meditation on Confucian ethics.
