Screening of In The Year of The Quiet Sun and Conversation with The Otolith Group | Activity
Session to expand on the audiovisual research by The Otolith Group into emancipation movements. In the film In the Year of the Quiet Sunthe astronomical time of the quiet sun converges with the political calendar of the conferences taking place in different African cities throughout the 1950s and 1960s.
In the Year of the Quiet Sun inaugurated The Otolith Group’s ongoing inquiry into the political imaginary of African emancipation. The group (made up of Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar) adopts the commemorative stamps issued in Ghana from 1957 to 1966 by Kwame Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party as a device for narrating the grand project of African continental unification. Tinted newsreel footage from the All-African People’s Conference in Accra in December 1958 is combined with a script that quotes Ruth First, Richard Wright and Frantz Fanon to reimagine both the prospect of a United States of Africa and the military coup of 24 February 1966 that terminated the prospect of African unity in Ghana.
The screening links up with The Otolith Group’s installation and audiovisual Mascon, part of the exhibition Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica.
Presentation and subsequent conversation with The Otholit Group.
In the Year of the Quiet Suncommissioned by Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen and Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons, Utrecht).
Programme
19:00 – 19:15 h
Presentation by Elvira Dyangani Ose
19:15 – 19:50 h
Screening of In The Year of The Quiet SunThe Otolith Group, 2013, UK, colour, 34 min, original language with Spanish subtitles, digital projection
19:50 – 20:30 h
Discussion with The Otolith Group (Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun) together with Elvira Dyangani Ose
participants
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.
MACBA Thirty
We celebrate Year Thirty of an infinite MACBA that projects the future as a space for revision and possibility: of taking up what was left unfinished, updating what needs it and projecting anew everything that can still be transformed.
exhibition
From 6 November 2025 to 6 April 2026
Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica
