…But There Are New Suns approaches the politics of time through its engagement with the poetics of temporal reconfiguration.

In drawing upon moments and moods specific to the aesthetics of Afro-Asian avant-gardes, as formulated by Joan Kee in The Geometries of Afro-Asia: Art Beyond Solidarity, The Otolith Group’s inhabitation of the structures provided by The Ignorant Art School aims at sustaining ‘interpretive communities’ enabled by the prospect of aesthetico-political work.

In its recitation of the epigram, written by the great science-fiction novelist Octavia Butler, the exhibition title …But There Are New Suns alludes to an imagination of scale capable of gaining traction upon the multiple alienations differentially experienced by communities living and working in and through the ‘Racial Capitalocene’. [i]

Underscored by a commitment to methods of study and objects of investigation that operate beneath, between and beyond the protocols and parameters of institutional legitimation, The Otolith Group approaches Cooper Gallery as an opportunity to assemble an interscalar vehicle that enables a tractive force upon what C.L.R. James calls ‘the future in the present.’

In approaching digital video as the occasion and the site for the study of study …But There Are New Suns focuses upon two installations: What the Owl Knows (2022) and O Horizon (2018).

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/36183