In the Otolith Group’s transtemporal consideration of modernity in urban India, the narrator questions, “Why do Indian artists produce so little science fiction?” The reply: “Satyajit Ray’s film The Alien would have rendered this question void. It is this emptiness that allows a nostalgia for a lost future.”

The three-part exhibition A Lost Future challenges existing histories and speculative futures across cultures and in Bengal—a culturally rich region divided between present-day India and Bangladesh. The three contemporary artists featured in the exhibition—Shezad Dawood, the Otolith Group, and Matti Braun—engage an evocative range of mediums that spans virtual reality to an immersive lake along with painting, film, sculpture, and photography. Through rich storytelling, A Lost Future explores themes of virtuality, modernity, and world-making in ways that are universal as well as interconnected and specific to this region.

A Lost Future presents still works by all three artists throughout the run, while the central cove will rotate to highlight each one individually.

A Lost Future: The Otolith Group (June 1–September 17, 2018) presents O Horizon, a newly completed film, which focuses on Visva Bharati, an art school at Santiniketan founded by Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, the cosmopolitan polymath who shaped Indian art, literature, music, and education. Filmed, recorded and researched over five years in West Bengal, India, O Horizon stages moments from Tagore’s extensive environmental pedagogy as a series of portraits, moods, studies, and sketches that allude to what might be described as the outlines of a “Tagorean cosmopolitics.”

O Horizon draws upon the modernist theories and practices of dance and song developed by Tagore as well as the experimental theories and practices of mural, sculpture, painting, and drawing developed by critical figures such as K.G. Subramanyan, Benode Behari Mukherjee, Nandalal Bose, and Ramkinkar Baij, whose work shaped the ethos of generations of Indian modernists. Featuring Santiniketan, Sriniketan, and surrounding areas of Birbhum, West Bengal, O Horizon draws together dance, song, music and recital, evoking the Tagorean imagination for the twenty-first century.

A selection of earlier films, including their “premake” of Ray’s unmade film The Alien, titled Otolith III (2009), will be screened in the Rubin Museum theater on select dates.

A Lost Future: Matti Braun (October 5, 2018–January 28, 2019) transforms the central gallery into an immersive lake that visitors can traverse. R.T., S.R., V.S. (2003–present) references the lotus pond in the first scene of Ray’s The Alien, in which a friendly, catalytic alien from another time and place lands in a village. It also draws inspiration from the first scene in Steven Spielberg’s E.T., which may have been directly influenced by Ray’s script.