English
From February 4, 2011 on, the MACBA will exhibit the work of the Otolith Group, founded in London in 2000 by Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun, which reflects on the perception of memory and subjectivity that the passage of time keeps in the human record.
The exhibition is conceived as a mixture of production that takes the viewer to understand a work methodology, where files and activities made with them, in different media supports, build a unit of significant events. Thus, the Cold War and the processes of global capitalism appear as fragments of a diary that are anchors in the subjectivity of individual memory and its critical potentiality of reconstruction and deconstruction of the narrative in progress.
The use of the documentary is presented as a collage that tells the forms of post-colonial condition, making a reflex that goes beyond the pictures, making art in a political speech that confronts the memory as a tool for building ideas for a future world.
For those who today argue about the aesthetics of memory and its urgent relation between past and present, as a barrier preventing the history from becomes the static figure of a closed time, finally sealed by the weight of the dominant culture, this exhibition reflects the radical claim to a society mired in this petrified present, where the formal, lightweight, empty of content aesthetic has eliminated the human condition to remember, to look back.
This is where Anjalika Sagar, whose studies Social Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies of London University and Fine Arts at the University of Middlesex and its status as founder of Multitudes, independent news network, and Kodwo Eshun, who studied English Literature at University College, Oxford University and author of More brilliant than the sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction; want to arrive to undress the present.
Their photographs, videos and installations have been subject to interesting criticism and aesthetic and political debate, some critics consider them essayists of the memory aesthetics because of the depth of their works and their impact on the viewer, that transform them into actors. Some of their most interesting works are: Destroy Athens, in the first Athens Biennial (2007); Imagine Action, Lisson Gallery (2007), Documenta 12 (2007), The Unhomely: Second International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Seville (2006 ) How to Improve the World: 60 Years of British Art, Hayward Gallery (2006), Ecotype: The Second ICP Triennial of Photography and Video, New York (2006) and the Tate Triennial (2006).
Nancy Guzman
If you visit apartments in Barcelona do not miss this exciting exhibition by Otholit Group and discover the importance of memory in the understanding of the world and the evolution of societies in the globalized capitalism. One minute to stop and reflect on our own future.?
