We’re delighted to bring together a convening of brilliant artists and practitioners to help excavate some ideas for the collaborative research that UNDO Fellows Deborah Stratman and Sukhdev Sandhu have undertaken this year in their inquiry on GEOLOGIC LISTENING. Their joint research as a part of the UNDO Fellowship extends Stratman’s longstanding engagement with the politics of landscape in her extensive body of work and will culminate in a publication authored by Sandhu.

Sunday July 24th, we’ll be spending an afternoon convening artists Aura Satz, Cauleen Smith, and collaborators of The Otolith Group: Kodwo Eshun & Anjalika Sagar. They have been invited to join Stratman and Sandhu’s process and along for the ride of critical probing around the Anthropocene, monumentality, and the politics of audibility that they’ve engaged since October 2021. This dialogue will take the form of a roundtable (of sorts) and will continue to look to geology as an experimental pedagogy, an archive from which to ponder the ways in which our society dwells between past and future catastrophes.

We will look to examples from the group’s own work and personal sets of references to follow a set of astonishing and resonant threads such as:

Geopoetry as an insurgent language, rock as alien, geological and psychological uncomformities, time travelers, fossils, or monuments as vibratory machines among other resonant rabbit roles to go down to support this research.

Contents from this roundtable will make it into the final commission of the fellowship edited by Sukhdev Sandhu alongside a lineup of writing from invited contributors.

Join the conversation here at UnionDocs with Deborah Stratman here in person as well as select guests from the group. We’ll follow the conversation with some backyard hanging and a toast to these fellows for their work in the backyard.

BIOS

Artist and filmmaker Deborah Stratman makes work that investigates issues of power, control and belief, exploring how places, ideas, and society are intertwined. Her multi-disciplinary practice is anchored in the sonic and the cinematic. Recent projects have addressed freedom, surveillance, public speech, sinkholes, levitation, orthoptera, raptors, comets, evolution, extinction, exodus, sisterhood and faith. She exhibits internationally and lives in Chicago where she teaches at the University of Illinois.

Sukhdev Sandhu directs the Colloquium for Unpopular Culture at New York University. His books include I’ll Get My Coat, Night Haunts, and Other Musics.

Kodwo Eshun is a filmmaker, theorist and artist, based in London. He is Lecturer in Contemporary Art Theory at Goldsmiths, Department of Visual Cultures, University of London and Professor of Visual Arts at Haut Ecole d’Art et Design, Genève. In 2002, he founded The Otolith Group together with Anjalika Sagar. Their essayistic approach reflects on the perception and nature of documentary practice through films, texts and activities related to media archives. From Cold War ideology to global capitalism processes, recent history appears as fragments of a personal diary which, in turn, could be fiction.

Anjalika Sagar studied social anthropology at the University of London School of Oriental and African Studies. She is interested in film essay and in the relationship between image, text and sound. Sagar works as a curator, moderator, essayist, film director, video-maker and photographer. Her extensive work has been shown at exhibitions all over the world. Anjalika, together with Kodwo Eshun, founded in 2002 The Otolith Group.

Aura Satz’s work encompasses film, sound, performance and sculpture. She has performed, exhibited and screened her work nationally and internationally, including Tate Modern, Tate Britain, Hayward Gallery, Sydney Biennale 2016, NTT InterCommunication Center, Tokyo; High Line Art, MoMA, New York; Kadist, San Francisco; and Sharjah Art Foundation. She has presented solo exhibitions at the Wellcome Collection, London; the Hayward Gallery project space, London; John Hansard Gallery, Southampton; Dallas Contemporary, Texas; George Eastman Museum, Rochester; ARTIUM Vitoria Gasteiz, among others. Satz has worked collaboratively with a wide range of composers, vocalists and musicians. She is currently developing her first feature film centred on the sound of sirens and emergency signals. She teaches at the Royal College of Art, where she currently holds a 2 year AHRC research and development fellowship.(FEEL Free to edit down and abbreviate)

Cauleen Smith (born Riverside, California, 1967) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work reflects upon the everyday possibilities of the imagination. Operating in multiple materials and arenas, Smith roots her work firmly within the discourse of mid-twentieth-century experimental film. Drawing from structuralism, third world cinema, and science fiction, she makes things that deploy the tactics of these disciplines while offering a phenomenological experience for spectators and participants. Her films, objects, and installations have been featured in group exhibitions. Studio Museum of Harlem, Houston Contemporary Art Museum; Yerba Buena Center for Art, and the New Museum, New York, D21 Leipzig and Decad, Berlin. She has had solo shows for her films and installations at The Kitchen, MCA Chicago, Threewalls, Chicago. She shows her drawings and 2D work with Corbett vs. Dempsey.