Our sense of gravity and orientation is controlled by a little something in our ear. The Otolith Group—Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun—derives its name from this inner ear doodah. So it’s not too far fetched to suggest that ears guide the group’s visual art practice. And if hearing is important, critical hearing is even more so. The faculty of critical hearing enables the artist to weed out the feedback generated by the debris of failed systems. In other words, the otolith is what Ernest Hemingway would call “a built-in bullshit detector.” “Westfailure,” the London-based duo’s first solo in Bombay, takes its title from British economist Susan Strange’s essay “The Westfailure System” (1999), in which she argues that Westphalian sovereignty has been entirely incapable of stymieing financial, ecological, and humanitarian meltdowns. A great deal of the Otolith Group’s work has entailed the interruption of Orwellian newspeak with “glitchspeak”—and “Westfailure” aspires to the same. The Westphalian sovereignty, proposed in the 17th century in Westphalia, Germany, is one such systemic impasse. The peace treaties that emerged initiated a new political order. The sovereign nation-state anchored in territoriality and the absence of unsought external interventions in the domestic realm was key to the new politics. The …