The Otolith Group, the artist collective founded by Kodwu Eshun and Anjalika Sagar, has put together a haunting new film The Radiant for Documenta 13 in Kassel, Germany (on view until September 16). At one level a straightforward documentary about the aftermath of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster, at another level it is an absorbing and disturbing meditation on the visible and the invisible, on life and half-life, and on the hermetically-sealed irrationality that our dependency upon technology can induce. It brought to mind Jane Bennet’s Vibrant Matter, except that I think its fair to say the lesson vital materialism has to teach is a darker one. The invisible world The Radiant evokes isn’t enchanted but radioactive or rather, as one of the excellent commentators recounts, enchanted and radioactive, the invisible layered over the invisible …
Tavia Nyong’o 