The Otolith Group: THE FORM OF THINKING

Barcelona: Until March 29, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA) will be presenting The Form of Thinking by The Otolith Group, an artistic bunch founded in London in 2001 by Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun.

Intertwining artworks and documental materials from different origins and natures, the exhibition –commissioned by Chus Martinez- presents a complex way of understanding how cinema invents images and relates them to sound, with the voice-over narration and many other voices that make reference to the representation.

The exhibition has been named after the title Thought Forms, a book written by socialist thinker and hands-on member of the Sociedad Teosófica, feminist Annie Wood Besant (1847-1933) and Charles W. Leadbeater (1854-1934). The volume, published in 1901, depicts the authors’ reflections on nature and the power of thoughts. “Existing is not enough,” they write in the last page. “We wish to live in a smart way. Living takes knowledge and knowing takes study. This opens up a vast territory before our eyes.”

The Otolith Group’s work points to the need of enhancing the mind, and that explains its desire in complicating the task of its interpretation in an effort to avoid immediate one-way readings. Images hail from the different sources they cotton on to, from a series of sci-fi posters all the way to a collection of historic photographs.

The exhibit lays out a multiplicity of narrations, materials and readings: thinking through the matter-origin, through the matter-sound, the matter-memory, the matter-narration, the matter-emotion, always with a plastic quality that shapes up in the mind.

The Otolith Group’s work stresses on the importance of methods. One of its proposals consists of de-figuring the comprehension of history and, more specifically, the hegemonic power of Europe over its colonies. Far from becoming privileged interpreters or commentators of the past, they come up with the impossibility of coherence within the text, with the narration as a starting point, and weave a multi-meaning discourse capable of downplaying the question on the true meaning of the words, their ultimate sense.

For more information on the exhibition, visit www.macba.cat