AFROFUTURISM, Detroit Techno, the role of the Atlantic in the Slave Trade, the effects of Capitalism, and a mythology of an underwater Black nation will be explored in a new exhibition at Galway Arts Centre.
A Sphere Of Water Orbiting A Star is the title of the new exhibition from The Otolith Group, the London-based, Turner Prize nominated, artist-led collective, founded by Anjalika Sagar, a curator, moderator, essayist, film director, video-maker, and photographer, and Kodwo Eshun, the British-Ghanaian writer, theorist, and filmmaker.
The exhibition’s opening day of Saturday May 13 begins at the Galway Arts Centre, 47 Dominick Street at 2pm with a preview of the exhibition. Visitors can expect to see moving images, audio works, performances, and installations, involving archival and contemporary images, recorded sound, documentary accounts, fictional narratives, video essay, and performative lecture.
At 3pm in the Galway Arts Centre’s Nuns Island Theatre, there will be a talk by Sagar and Eshun, followed by a lecture on the history of Techno by musician, DeForrest Brown Jr.
The formal launch of the exhibition itself is at 5pm in the Galway Arts Centre, 47 Dominick Street. There will be a live electronic music set from De Forrest Brown Jr at 8pm in The Galway Distillery, Merchant’s Road.
Among the works on display will be the title work, ‘A Sphere Of Water Orbiting A Star’, which investigates the Black counter-cultural Detroit Techno duo, Drexciya (James Stimson and Gerald Donald ), who, through their music and albums, created a mythological underwater civilisation of Black people born from the pregnant African women thrown overboard during the middle passage of slave ships across the Atlantic.
“From their initial recording Deep Sea Dweller in 1991 to their final recording Grava 4 in 2002, the sonic fictions of black electronic music conceived and composed by James Stimson and Gerald Donald of Drexciya, from within the black counter culture of Detroit Techno, continue to exert a force of attraction upon generations of music fans, producers, artists, novelists, critics, theorists and curators within and beyond North America,” says Eshun.
Stimson’s untimely passing in 2002 has only intensified the extent to which, as Eshun says, the “marine musical mythology and the mythological marine music of Drexciya mystifies, intrigues and enthrals listeners to an extent unparalleled in postwar electronic music”.
‘A Sphere Of Water Orbiting A Star’, conceived by Eshun and Sagar, in collaboration with sound designer and composer Tyler Friedman, features unreleased recordings of conversations between Gerald Donald and Kodwo Eshun
The other major piece will be The Otolith Group’s acclaimed film, Hydra Decapita (2010, 31 minutes ). The film is a lament for the women, men and children from the West Coast of Africa who were “liquidated by British imperial capitalism”, as well as being a “meditation upon the high crimes of its transatlantic slave trade”. Yet it is also “an elegy informed by an undying love for the electronic music composed by Detroit’s Drexciya between 1993 and 2002”.
The Otolith Group - named after the calcium carbonate structure of the inner ear which allows us to perceive motion and acceleration - was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2010 for its project, ‘A Long Time Between Suns’. It has exhibited in Austria, Melbourne, New York, Japan, Los Angeles, and recently at the Irish Museum of Modern Art.
Joining The Otolith Group at the launch of the exhibition in Galway will be the pioneering techno musician DeForrest Brown Jr, who releases music under his own name and as Speaker Music. He is a representative of the Make Techno Black Again campaign - drawing attention to the fact that Techno music was pioneered by African-Americans in Detroit and Chicago. He is also the author of Assembling a Black Counter Culture, which was published in 2021.
“The Otolith Group are some of the most extraordinary artists in the world today and I am so pleased to bring their work to Galway for the first time,” says Galway Arts Centre Director, Megs Morley. “The work is as challenging as it is beautiful, drawing from complex histories of the Atlantic and searching for new imagined worlds through sonic and visual portals. Creatively, the sea occupies a unique place in our collective psyche, a place of liminality, a place in-between, a place of dreams, of the deep unknown, of imagined horizons. The work created in Galway of the mouth of the Corrib entering the Atlantic, reminds us of the interconnected nature of our world - our shared seas connect our shared histories and our shared need and desire to imagine beyond them.”
Admission to all events on Saturday May 13 is free, but booking is advised via:
https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/artists-talk-the-otolith-group-and-deforrest-brown-jr-tickets-626908087967
The Otolith Group at Galway Arts Centre runs from Saturday May 13 to Saturday July 1. Gallery opening times are 10am to 5pm Mondays to Saturdays (closed Sundays ). Admission is free and all are welcome.
Galway Arts Centre is grateful to the Arts Council, Galway City Council, HANGAR Artistic Research Center, Lisbon, and the British Council Ireland for their generosity in support of this exhibition.
