“We’ll transfer to the land of birds as a flock of earlier people” takes its title from Mahmoud Darwish’s poem The ‘Purple Indian’s’ Penultimate Speech to the White Man translated from Arabic by Fady Joudah in 1992.

The exhibition makes public moments from ongoing analysis undertaken by The Otolith Group into the techniques and the methods of anti-imperialist internationalism deployed by the Girls’s Worldwide Democratic Federation or WIDF on the top of the International Chilly Conflict from 1945 till 1963.

Though the Girls’s Worldwide Democratic Federation continues into the current from its Secretariat in Sao Paulo, “We’ll transfer to the land of birds as a flock of earlier people” focuses on what Elizabeth B Armstrong calls the “political replica” of bulletins, periodicals, pamphlets, pictures and illustrations produced by the WIDF for its conferences and congresses from 1945 to 1963.

“We’ll transfer to the land of birds as a flock of earlier people” dramatises the declarations, resolutions, appeals, emblems, slogans and statements printed and distributed by the WIDF from its founding Congress in Paris in November 1945, persevering with to the Convention of the Girls of Asia in Beijing in December 1949 and concluding with the World Congress of Girls in Moscow in June 1963.

From the panorama of “We develop into an ode opening its home windows to be recited” to the tinted, pinned and printed pages of look upon our land via the speech of stars to the murmuration of emblems entitled We’ll alight onto ourselves and return if we must always awaken, the title for every new work comes from a line chosen from a poem by Mahmoud Darwish: The Hoopoe, translated by Munir Akash and Carolyn Forche from the quantity “I See What I Need To See” in 1990, The ‘Purple Indian’s’ Penultimate Speech to the White Man from the quantity “Eleven Planets,” translated from Arabic by Fady Joudah in 1992, and Counterpoint, from the quantity “Exile,” translated by Fady Joudah in 2005.

“We’ll transfer to the land of birds as a flock of earlier people” brings collectively analysis performed by the artists since 2010 into deinstitutionalised photographic archives of the Federation of Indian Girls held by The Otolith Group with latest analysis undertaken on the web site of the Sophia Smith Assortment: Girls’s Historical past Archive at Smith School, Northampton, Massachusetts and the archives of Elizabeth B. Armstrong.

at Greengrassi, London
till March 2, 2024