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Review Mar 20 2009 « | »
A Long Time Between Suns at Gasworks The otolith is a tiny organ, located in the inner ear, which orientates our body to the earth's gravitational......

Emma Bennett

The otolith is a tiny organ, located in the inner ear, which orientates our body to the earth's gravitational field. You could think of it as the part which perpetuates our sense of belonging here, clamped to the planet on all sides, like so many limpets.

A Long Time Between Suns, billed rather confusingly as a 'solo show in two parts by The Otolith Group' comprises two complex and absorbing films: Otolith I and Otolith II. Uncertain identities proliferate in and around the work: family histories narrated by an imagined future descendent, an 'expatriate' space-dweller who, from her weightless world, traces fluid trajectories through the archives of the 20th century.

Otolith I draws together archive footage of iconic Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkov, the 2003 demonstrations against the Iraq War in London, and a zero gravity training flight from Star City in luminous montage. The effect is wholly absorbing, and absorbingly demanding.

And this show certainly makes demands. Rather than played on continuous loop, the films are shown at advertised intervals in largely unadorned gallery. Viewers sit around a concisely-lit table, as if at conference. Far from relaxing into the soothing passivity of the cinematic experience - it feels like we are expected to make notes.

After a short, silent break in which we gallery goers shuffle awkwardly in our seats, Otolith II intensifies the sense of the cinematic - here, an extended, intertextual contemplation of Mumbai's mega-slums feels timely, especially as this work goes beyond the familiar images of teeming deprivation, (or indeed the vaguely glamorised version of slum life recently made popular by a certain awards night favourite).

Instead, we are treated to some absorbing footage of various inhabitants of Mumbai at work: a film crew assemble and disassemble scenery on a city waterfront, residents of the city's mega slum launder vivid fabrics in a river, shouting with the effort of dashing their heavily sodden garments against rocks, and, in an unidentified workshop, we see the precise and rhythmic movements of hands embroidering intricately threaded patterns onto anonymous garments.

These are Mumbai's bodies at work, shot in close-up sequences which are at once intimate and depersonalised. The ever-impassive voice-over draws comparisons between the mega-slum as potential 'city of the future' with the 1960s utopian architectural projects of Le Courbusier, 'inventor of the tower-block'.

It seems that, as our world tips towards overpopulation, its archives overflow with discredited ideologies and thwarted hopes. A Long Time Between Suns proposes a space in which to sense the gravity of a single moment, a single image; the weight of our responsibility to history and - perhaps more crucially - to the future.

See the website for viewing times by clicking here.

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