Fathoming The Otolith Group’s work on showing in India

Gallery Project 88 hosts a show entitled ‘Westfailure', incidentally first solo of The Otolith Group in Mumbai.

Westfailure, the title chosen by the two artists, has been adopted from an essay written by British economist Susan Strange in 1999. It’s a homonymic pun that refers to the Westphalia System, the ‘international political system of states claiming exclusive authority and the monopoly of legitimate violence within their territorial limits’, named after the Treaty of Westphalia signed in 1648 by the European powers, in Westphalia outside Munster, Germany.

Strange argued that in order to prosper, ‘production and trade required the security provided by the state. To survive, the state required the economic growth and the credit-creating system of finance. But the latter has now created three major problems that the political system, by its very nature, is incapable of solving. As a term from the recent past of 1999, Westfailure looks forward to our present. ‘Westfailure’ summarizes the pervasive sense of life as it is lived today, in an ideological junkyard strewn with the wreckage of economic systems.

The Otolith Group was founded by Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar in 2002. Shortlisted for Turner Prize in 2010, It’s named after the calcium carbonate microcrystals within the inner ear that produce and maintain the bodily sense of orientation. They are renowned for their videos, curatorial practice, writing, publications and development of discursive platforms for the close readings of documentary fictions.

The show hosted in collaboration with British Council India was accompanied by a screening of ‘ Nervus Rerum’, a Latin term for the ‘nerve of things’, that confronts the problem of the representability of the Palestinian people confined to a geographical enclave, in this case, Jenin refugee camp, by the longstanding military occupation of the Israeli Defence Force.

Since 2002, The Otolith Group has revisited episodes from the archives of the twentieth century in order to intervene into narratives that aim to capture futurity for market fundamentalism. Their work has proposed aesthetic hypotheses that emphasize methods of comparability and modes of connectability.