‘Westfailure’ at Project 88

Mumbai-based Project 88 hosts The Otolith Group’s show, entitled ‘Westfailure'. Here is a quick look at their works on view:

The Group’s new work ‘Anathema’ might be understood as an attempt to make visible the archetypal power of what Jodi Dean calls ‘communicative capitalism’ that works by enthralling populations at the level of libido. It recombines magical gestures, isolated from hundreds of advertisements for mobile phones, laptops and flat screen televisions, from the UAE to US and beyond, purchased by the artists.

By confronting the gestural regimes of touching and clicking with images of liquid crystal that provides the material substrates for digital screens, by demoralizing the value of the high definition image and by descending beneath the dimension of the high resolution image into the world of post-cinematic abstraction, it can be understood as a prototype for a counterspell assembled from the occult economy.

‘Timeline’ offers an insight into the scope and scale of ‘The Otolith Trilogy’ (2003–09). Conceived as an epic fabulation, it introduces events and figures from the trilogy, beginning in the late 19th Century and extending into the far future.

Installed in Westfailure as a single channel work, ‘Communists Like Us’ assembles archival photographs produced by Soviet and Chinese agencies that record journeys made by Indian stateswomen to the USSR, Mao’s China and Japan from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s.

Some photographs from ‘Communists Like Us recur’ in Otolith II and in ‘Daughter Products’. ‘Daughter Products’ offers insights into forms of socialist friendship. ‘Be Silent for the Ears of the God…’ dramatizes the figure of the guru as the recurring enactment of a prosthetic Indophilia, characterized outside India, within and across Europe and America and beyond, as a series of over-determined projections, mistaken attributions and persistent phantasms.

One out of many ‘Indophilias’ approaches the supports of the vinyl album record sleeve as a platform for the visions of prosthetic spiritualism. As a medium that invents the public it addresses, the record sleeve facilitates the circulation of a stylistic imaginary that create spaces of identification through which, in the words of Paul Gilroy, ‘cultural and aesthetic exchanges between different populations across the diaspora’ can be constructed.