Text by CLOT Magazine
The ICA is the only U.S. venue for Xenogenesis. Opened in 2018, the ICA showcases an ever-changing slate of exhibitions, performances, films, and special programs that translate our world into every medium. From February 22 until May 10, 2020, the ICA presents the exhibition The Otolith Group: Xenogenesis.
Xenogenesis is named after The Xenogenesis Trilogy, Butler’s title for her science fiction novels that began with Dawn (1987), continued with Adulthood Rites (1988) and concluded with Imago (1989). The Group employs essayistic compositions to explore questions of human extinction, racial distinction, planetary transformation, and chronopolitical conflicts.
The Otolith Group was founded in 2002 and consists of Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun, who live and work in London. Their work is research-based and spans the moving image, audio, performance, installation, and curation and explores 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.
Xenogenesis consists of Anathema (2011), People to be Resembling (2012), In the Year of the Quiet Sun (2012), Medium Earth (2013), Who Does The Earth Think It Is (2013), Sovereign Sisters (2014), Statecraft: An Incomplete Timeline of African Independence (2014–ongoing), From Left to Night (2015), The Third Part Of The Third Measure (2017) and, O Horizon (2018).
A monograph on the work of The Otolith Group will be published in 2020 with new texts by Fred Moten, Anselm Franke, Avery Gordon, Rizvana Bradley, Grant Watson and others. The Otolith Group: Xenogenesis, organised by the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, the Netherlands and curated by Annie Fletcher, marks the group’s first large-scale exhibition in North America.
