Friday 28 August 2026, 7.30pm
Selected episodes from Alice Coltrane’s extraordinary devotional television series Eternity’s Pillar, newly released on Blu-ray by Exotic Material.
In 1985, KTTV Channel 11, an independent commercial television station in Los Angeles, began broadcasting Eternity’s Pillar every Sunday after midnight. Across the series, Alice Coltrane, appearing as Swamini Turiyasangitananda, presented devotional wisdom, meditation and music in an ecumenical context.
The programmes bring together solo performances on piano, harp, organ and OB-8 synthesizer, music composed from scripture, readings from Coltrane’s Endless Wisdom, chanting with members of the Vedantic Center, dance, meditation and vivid 1980s video effects. Created, directed, written and scored by Coltrane herself, the series offers a remarkable window onto her musical and spiritual life during a period in which she had largely withdrawn from the commercial music world.
Broadcast between 1985 and 1988, Eternity’s Pillar remained little seen outside Los Angeles. Seventeen surviving episodes have now been digitised from original U-matic broadcast master tapes held by the Coltrane archive and presented together for the first time in a limited-edition Blu-ray release from Exotic Material.
For this special release event, Cafe OTO presents a selection of restored episodes from the newly released edition, celebrating one of the most extraordinary and under-seen chapters in Alice Coltrane’s life and work.
As part of the programme, Dr Aditi Ahalya Jaganathan and Kodwo Eshun come together for a conversation around Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda’s extraordinary audiovisual and spiritual world. Jaganathan’s current Rhythm, Race, Revolution programme at Mosaic Rooms includes a session journeying with and through Alice Coltrane’s work, while Eshun has written and spoken about Coltrane as part of a Black sonic tradition of radical transformation, “holy amplification” and speculative possibility, most notably in More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction. Taking Eternity’s Pillar as a point of departure, they will consider music, devotion, moving image, Black radical imagination and the ways Coltrane’s work opens onto other forms of listening, learning and collective life.
Dr Aditi Ahalya Jaganathan is a researcher, writer and educator whose work explores Black and Brown cultural production, radical pedagogy and creativity as decolonial praxis. Her research examines the ways cultural production can generate autonomous forms of meaning-making and self-determination, with the imagination understood as a site of refusal and possibility. Through her ongoing course Rhythm, Race, Revolution, she uses music, film and visual culture as tools for collective study around race, gender, colonialism, healing and transformative justice. She completed her doctorate at Brunel University London and has taught at Goldsmiths, alongside developing independent educational and curatorial projects.
Kodwo Eshun is a London-based theorist, filmmaker and artist whose work spans Black Studies, Pan-Africanism, experimental moving image, diasporic science fiction and alternative futurisms. He is Lecturer in Aural/Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, and co-founder with Anjalika Sagar of The Otolith Group, the interdisciplinary artist collective established in 2002 and nominated for the Turner Prize in 2010. Eshun is the author of the landmark More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction, which explores the speculative possibilities of Black music through figures including Sun Ra, Alice Coltrane, Lee Perry and Underground Resistance. Across writing, filmmaking and curatorial practice, his work examines how sound and image can generate alternative histories, cosmologies and futures.
