WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Clark Art Institute will screen O Horizon at 7:30 p.m. on Sept. 29, the first presentation in its five-part Film and Art series which runs from September to November.

Alena Williams, assistant professor of Art at Williams College, introduces O Horizon prior to its showing. The free screening is open to the public and takes place in the Clark’s auditorium.

O Horizon (2018, 90 minutes) is an experimental documentary that explores the environmental teachings of prolific Bengali writer and poet Rabindranath Tagore. The first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (1913), Tagore authored novels, poems, short stories, musical dramas, dance dramas, songs, and more.

Tagore was also a social reformer who cared deeply for the land. The film title references the surface layer of soil, changed in the area around Santiniketan, in West Bengal, India, as a result of Tagore’s introduction of new flora there.

O Horizon was commissioned by research project bauhaus imaginista and produced by artist-led collective The Otolith Group, an organization that creates films, installations, and performances driven by extensive research into the histories of science fiction and the legacies of capitalism and imperialism. 

O Horizon is part of The Otolith Group’s larger engagement with the environment and serves as a powerful meditation on Indian modernism. "Flitting between music, dance, poetry and literature, O Horizon, offers a fragmented yet engrossing view of a Tagorean ethos…" writes Tausif Noor of Frieze magazine.