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Royal Hospital Kilmainham
Dublin 8, D08 FW31, Ireland
Phone +353 1 6129900

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All IMMA Talks are recorded and the vast majority are made available on our Soundcloud page, an incredible free resource where you can hear directly from artists, curators and leading thinkers on the themes behind the work we present. We are in the process of transferring our Soundcloud archive to this new site, but in the meantime you can visit our full archive on Soundcloud, or search this site for transferred media below.


Join Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar, The Otolith Group, for a conversation with IMMA Director Annie Fletcher that explores a range of works included in the major exhibition of their work Xenogenesis, that range from Anathema (2011) to O Horizon (2018). This talk gives insight into The Otolith Group’s post-cinematic practice that reflects on the artists’ ongoing commitment to creating what they think of as ‘a science fiction of the present’ through images, voices, sonic images, sounds, and performance.

Eshun and Sagar will discuss some of their close readings of Octavia Butler’s science fictions and Butler’s term, Xenogenesis, that inspires the title of the exhibition and an ongoing programme of conversations titled DXG – the Department of Xenogenesis. DXG reflects on Butler’s far reaching speculative fictions, to engage with the author’s black feminist imagination of the denaturalisation of the human, offering a series of thought experiments on what Denise Ferreira da Silva calls a black feminist poethics at the end of the world. DXG is supported by IMMA and provides the framework for a expanded series of talks, discussions, lectures, seminars and workshop that offers a critical reappraisal of Octavia Butlers seminal science fiction works.

Opening Conversation, The Otolith Group with Annie Fletcher: 5.15pm 
Opening Conversation with The Otolith Group is presented as part of IMMA Nights, where this summer IMMA opens the grounds of the RHK on Thursday and Friday evenings until 8.30pm, with a series of free events that includes talks, music, workshops and more. Booking essential.

Exhibition Opening: 6.30pm
This talk coincides with the exhibition opening and launch of Xenogenesis  by The Otolith Group, comprising of late exhibition viewing, complimentary drinks reception and music.

Music in the Courtyard: 7.10pm – 8.30pm
Featuring DJ sets by Kate Butler and NKECHI.
Kate Butler is a writer and DJ in Dublin since the 1990s, Kate has a monthly show on Dublin Digital Radio (ddr), inspired by rave culture, community clubbing and the disorientating futurism of contemporary dance music. Kate is currently writing This is a Story about Control: Music, Technology and Gendered Roles of Creativity, a book and documentary about women and non-binary people using technology to make music.

NKECHI is an Irish DJ of Nigerian/South African descent based in Lisbon. She has created mixes for Gash collective, DiaxDem and was part of the Skin&Blisters selector series. A lover of club culture her sound is influenced by the percussive club sounds of GQOM, Uk Funky, Baile Funk to bouncy breakbeat and acid house.


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About the speakers

The Otolith Group was founded by artists and theorists Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun in 2002. The anatomical entity of the otolith operates as a kind of figurative black box for withholding intention and calculating discrepancy. Articulating the idea of the Otolith with the idea of the Group alludes to the histories of collective practices invented by artists that theorise and theorists that practice art within and beyond the United Kingdom.

Significant solo exhibitions of their work include the touring exhibition Xenogenesis; O Horizon, The Rubin Museum of Art, New York (2018); The Radiant, Art Gallery Miyauchi, Japan (2017); In the Year of the Quiet Sun, Bergen Kunsthall and CASCO Office for Art Design and Theory, Utrecht (2014–2015); Novaya Zemlya, Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto (2014–2015); Medium Earth, REDCAT, Los Angeles (2013); Westfailure, Project 88, Mumbai (2012); Thoughtform, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona and MAXXI, Rome (2011–2012); A Long Time Between Suns (Part I), Gasworks, London (2009); and A Long Time Between Suns (Part II), The Showroom, London (2009), for which they were nominated for the Turner Prize in 2010.
See more details here


About The Otolith Group: Xenogenesis

The Otolith Group: Xenogenesis is curated by Annie Fletcher, Director of IMMA, the exhibition originated at the Van Abbemuseum, the Netherlands, and toured to Buxton Contemporary, Melbourne; Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond; Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge, the Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah; and the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkove, Ljubljana, Slovenia. Exhibition architecture is by Diogo Passarinho Studio.

The exhibition is accompanied by a major new publication, Xenogenesis, an extensive and comprehensive polyphonic exploration of the work of The Otolith Group. See more details here