O Horizon (2018)

O Horizon (2018) will screen weekly at 3 pm on Thursdays and 4 pm on Saturdays + Sundays in the ICA’s auditorium. The film is a part of the exhibition The Otolith Group: Xenogenesis, on view now—May 10th.

O HORIZON (2018)

Soil scientists use the term “o horizon” to refer to the surface layer of organic matter continually altered by human activity. The Otolith Group adopted this term for their study of Santiniketan, West Bengal, India, where the educator and social reformer Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) founded Visva-Bharati School of Art in 1921. Tagore drew on ancient Indian philosophies as well as Japanese and Chinese aesthetic traditions to create a pan-Asian educational approach, in contrast to the colonial systems imposed by the British empire. The Otolith Group’s twenty-first century portrait situates the school’s everyday activities—discussions under trees, scientific work, performances, recitals—within a broad view of human-altered landscape.

“O Horizon begins with a poem entitled ‘The Year 1400,’ written by Tagore in 1896, in which he imagines his words traveling through time to be read by a poet from the next century. That poem suggested to us a dimension of time travel in Tagore’s work… ‘The Year 1400’ became a portal through which we could enter a Tagorean universe, assembled from different modes and moods of study that recur throughout the video.”
—The Otolith Group