The title of the exhibition references the African-American science fiction novelist Octavia Butler’s legendary Xenogenesis trilogy which opens with Dawn (1987), continues with Adulthood Rites (1988) and concludes with Imago (1989). The term Xenogenesis conjoins the Greek prefix xenos meaning strange or alien with the suffix genesis meaning origin or generation. Butler’s neologism informs Eshun and Sagar’s longstanding preoccupation with the promise and threat of the idea of alien becoming.
The most recent work in Xenogenesis, O Horizon (2018), is a portrait of Visva Bharati University, which was established in 1919 in Santiniketan, West Bengal, by the polymath Rabindranath Tagore. Alongside Butler and Tagore, the music of the African-American avant-garde composer Julius Eastman, provides the raison d’etre for the installation The Third Part of the Third Measure (2017) dedicated by Sagar and Eshun to the memory of their friend Mark Fisher and the Movement for Black Lives.
Xenogenesis was first shown at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven in May 2019, and was curated by Annie Fletcher. Its presentation in Sharjah is organised by Van Abbemuseum and Sharjah Art Foundation and co-curated by Annie Fletcher, Director, Irish Museum of Modern Art and Hoor Al Qasimi, Director, Sharjah Art Foundation. Original exhibition architecture designed by Diogo Passarinho Studio.
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