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 major 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.

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."