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Otolith Group: Opening Reception

Exhibition Opening

Otolith Group: Opening Reception

The London-based collective will present Mascon, a new audiovisual mosaic of images and sounds inspired by African cinema.

In the fall of 2024, the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society will present Mascon: A Massive Concentration of Black Experiential Energy. The exhibition features a new moving-image work by the Otolith Group, a London-based collective founded in 2002 by Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar. The collective's films, installations, and performances are powered by extensive research into the histories of science fiction and the legacies of transnationalism. This exhibition will coincide with the presentation of a new mural commissioned for Art Institute of Chicago’s Griffin Court as a prelude to Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica, a major exhibition opening at the museum December 15. Both installations are presented as part of a series of events and exhibitions linked to Panafrica: Histories, Aesthetics, Politics, a multi-year research project at the Neubauer Collegium

Curated by Dieter Roelstraete.

Artists' Statement

Think of Mascon: A Massive Concentration of Black Experiential Energy as an audiovisual investigation into the gestures, geometries, grammars, and geographies that compose the forms and the forces of the films of Ousmane Sembene and Djibril Diop Mambety from 1963 to 2004. As an audiovisual mosaic of still moving images and sounds extricated from the frames of the narratives of Mambety and Sembene in order to circulate in a migratory orbit that summons the borderless imagination of the cine-Sahel. As morphologies that amplify the Sembenean and Mambetyan motifs of Cinemafricana until they assail the imagination with the expansive deformation, centrifugal contraction, compacted compression and amassed concentration that Stephen Henderson calls "Mascon" or "black experiential energy."

Neubauer Collegium

The London-based collective will present Mascon, a new audiovisual mosaic of images and sounds inspired by African cinema.

Register

Betye Saar: Opening Reception

Exhibition Opening

Betye Saar: Opening Reception

This exhibition will hinge on Saar's experiments with “wearable” art, bringing into focus her gradual shift from costume design to collage.

The Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society will present an exhibition by Betye Saar, a key figure in the Black Arts Movement of the 1970s. Inspired by the transformative memory of Saar’s visit to the African collections of Chicago’s Field Museum in the mid-1970s, this exhibition will hinge on the artist’s experiments with “wearable” art, bringing into focus her gradual shift from working in costume design toward the instantly recognizable collage aesthetic she is justly feted for to this day.

Neubauer Collegium

This exhibition will hinge on Saar's experiments with “wearable” art, bringing into focus her gradual shift from costume design to collage.

Register

Director’s Lecture with Drew Gilpin Faust

Director's Lecture

Director’s Lecture with Drew Gilpin Faust

Drew Gilpin Faust, President Emerita of Harvard University, is a renowned scholar of American history.

About the Speaker

Drew Gilpin Faust is the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Research Professor at Harvard, where she served as president from 2007 to 2018.

Faust previously served as founding dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (2001-2007). Before coming to Radcliffe, she was the Annenberg Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania.

She is the author of seven books, including, most recently, Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury, published in August 2023. Her earlier book, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (2008), was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize and was awarded the Bancroft Prize, the New-York Historical Society’s American History Book Prize, and recognized by The New York Times as one of the “Ten Best Books of 2008.” This Republic of Suffering is the basis for a 2012 Emmy-nominated episode of the PBS American Experience documentaries titled Death and the Civil War, directed by Ric Burns.

Faust’s honors include awards in 1982 and 1996 for distinguished teaching at the University of Pennsylvania. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1994, the Society of American Historians in 1993, and the American Philosophical Society in 2004. In September 2018 she was awarded the John W. Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity by the Library of Congress. She received her bachelor’s degree from Bryn Mawr in 1968, magna cum laude with honors in history, and master’s (1971) and doctoral (1975) degrees in American civilization from the University of Pennsylvania. She and her husband live in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

About the Director's Lecture Series

The Roman Family Director’s Lecture series at the Neubauer Collegium, made possible through the generous support of University of Chicago Trustee Emmanuel Roman, MBA’87, brings distinguished speakers to the University of Chicago to share their insights with faculty, students, and the broader community. The aim of these events is to deepen public knowledge about the world and humanity’s place in it. More >

Drew Gilpin Faust, President Emerita of Harvard University, is a renowned scholar of American history.

Register