What does it mean to exist in a state of “becoming alien” or “becoming strange”? These questions power The Otolith Group: Xenogenesis. The exhibition presents a cross-section of artworks from 2011 to 2018 by The Otolith Group, established in 2002 by Anjalika Sagar (b. 1968 London) and Kodwo Eshun (b. 1966, London). 

The term Xenogenesis alludes to influential African-American science fiction novelist Octavia Estelle Butler (1947–2006)’s classic Xenogenesis Trilogy, published from 1987 to 89 and later retitled Lilith’s Brood. Butler’s powerful novels investigated questions of human extinction, racial distinction, planetary transformation, enforced mutation, generative alienation, and altered kinship. Along with Butler, two other key figures are key to the conception of Xenogenesis. The towering musical achievements of the African-American avant-garde composer Julius Eastman (1940–1990) forms the object and the attitude of The Third Part of the Third Measure (2017), while the enduring experiments in art as pedagogy and psychology by the Indian polymath Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) shape the subject and the method of O Horizon (2018).