SHANGHAI — In the early 1980s, when I was a girl intrigued by science and space, I raptly watched the 13-episode documentary Cosmos on American TV. Hosted by the charismatic astronomer Carl Sagan, it connected science and civilization, explored the possibility of extraterrestrial life, and deepened cosmic curiosity in a public still in the throes of humankind’s then-recent journeys to the moon and beyond. In the soaring entrance of the 14th Shanghai Biennale, titled Cosmos Cinema and on view in the city’s vast Power Station of Art contemporary art center, I experienced a flash of nostalgia for that time, perhaps an escape from today’s dire earthly conditions. Within that first darkened space, Trevor Paglen’s silver “Prototype for a Nonfunctional Satellite (Design 4; Build 4)”(2013) hangs as an illuminated, mirrored globe — shiny and pure.
Cosmos Cinema emerged from Russia-born chief curator (and e-flux cofounder) Anton Vidokle’s similar intrigue on the other side of the Cold War’s space race, and his later research of Russian Cosmism, an obscure intellectual movement that proposed, among other things, amending the Soviet Union’s constitution to include “universal rights to rejuvenation, immortality, and interplanetary travel.” Cosmism’s utopian ideals — coupled with German filmmaker/thinker Alexander Kluge’s assertions that cinema is analogous to early dreams of leaving Earth — were the starting points that inspired Vidokle and his team (Zairong Xiang, Hallie Ayres, Lukas Brasiskis, and Ben Eastham) to assemble this sprawling exhibition that dives into ancient cosmologies, current issues, and futurist dreams, both terrestrial and extraterrestrial, through a cinematic lens.
The show unfolds in nine conceptual chapters called “palaces” (the first is “freedom of interplanetary travel”; others include “ten thousand things,” “futurisms,” and “of time and space”). Video work is predictably abundant, but even apart from the many black boxes, the biennale’s spaces are mostly dark and hushed, like a movie theater or night sky. Spot- or backlights illuminate objects and vitrines; other works — like Liam Gillick’s “A Voyage in Search of Rational Senses” (2023), a mini-model of a museum bathed in a multicolored light show — use light as material.
Recurring themes meander through the “palaces”: beyond space travel (Jonas Staal’s monumental piece in the Power Station’s chimney, titled “Exo-Ecologies,” 2023, is an interspecies “launch pad”) are works addressing early human myths and systems — Saodat Ismailova’s two-channel video “Two Horizons” (2022) dreamily sets a young boy in a haunting Central Asian landscape and melds the story of the famous Soviet spaceport in what is now Kazakhstan with an old prophecy of a person who can defy gravity and achieve immortality. Michel Seuphor’s 64 line drawings representing hexagrams from the I Ching — arranged in a huge half-circular vitrine — are each labelled with heady slogans like “solidarity” or “the strength of the lonely man.” There are dashes of esotericism, too: Emma Kunz’s colorful geometric “energy field” drawings from the 1930s are powerfully vibrating mandalas (the healer claimed her art was not for her time, but rather for the 21st century), and Nolan Oswald Dennis’s wall drawings meld African belief systems and astrology.
Other works address current issues like climate: in Wanuri Kahiu and Christian Nyampeta’s “Pumzi”(2009), a 20-minute post-apocalyptic sci-fi film, the protagonist sacrifices her life to allow a plant to live, while Clarissa Tossin’s wall pieces (including “Future Geography: Hyades Star Cluster,” 2021) weave shredded Amazon delivery boxes with strips of printed images of deep space: “maps” illustrating the sky’s geography with the products of terrestrial extraction. And He Zike’s film “Random Access” (2023) explores urban fragility: A retired cab driver tries to navigate the city of Guiyang, today’s Chinese data capital, after a power outage, evoking shared memories of the past with her passenger. (Such fragility is an interesting idea in Shanghai, whose recent strict pandemic lockdown measures resulted in social unrest.)
Several intriguing shows-within-shows mainly highlight how 20th-century thinkers and artists imagined a cosmic future — in one dark room is part of the collection of George Costakis, who in the 1920s amassed a number of avant-garde works by Russian Constructivists such as Malevich and Rodchenko; these and other artists’ wonderful abstract-figurative drawings and paintings on view here include telescopes and robots. Another space is dedicated to interpretations of Solaris, the 1972 Soviet sci-fi film based on Stanisław Lem’s 1961 novel. (The show’s one performative piece, Arseny Zhilyaev’s “Shanghai Operations Room,” 2023, also riffs on a sci-fi classic: the empty yellow rooms refer to the “god room” in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.)
With more than 80 artists, 200 works, and so much time-based art, seeing all of Cosmos Cinema is a commitment, but one of the show’s core questions is how time and space stretch, fold, wrinkle, and collapse into each other; one line in Raqs Media Collective’s video “The Bicyclist Who Fell into a Time Cone” (2023) states that “things might vanish from history, but they do not vanish from time,” while Suzanne Treister, in a fascinating series of comic-like drawings called The Escapist BHST Black Hole Spacetime (2018–19), asserts that “time is a drug.”
The show’s choreography — upstairs and back down, with detours and mysterious passages through glass doors — is as convoluted as the plots and subplots in an art-house film; hot topics like gender, Indigenous ritual, and Afrofuturism crop up (too) briefly. At times Cosmos Cinema packs in too many storylines, and viewers risk losing touch with the when, where, and how.
At the show’s exit, production and curatorial credits roll across a screen on a heavy black curtain — a cleverly cinematic outro. And as in the moments after any good sci-fi film, we ask questions: Are we doomed? Can we escape the mess we’ve made of our earth, here or somewhere else? Cosmos Cinema lays out a melancholy utopia; it feels as if we’re being asked to choose hope or despair. I, for one, choose hope. Returning to my initial nostalgia, back in the exhibition’s first space near Paglen’s silver orb is a round couch on which a dozen or so viewers can sit and watch Eva Szasz’s animated “Cosmic Zoom”(1968) on one wall, or, fully reclined, see Charles and Ray Eames’s “Powers of Ten” (1977) on the ceiling. Both films take a simple western-world scene (a boy and a dog boating in a Canadian river; a New York couple picnicking on a blanket), zoom out to deep space, and zoom back in to the atoms comprising our cells. Both were made in an era in which the “whole earth” was a new concept, and globalism seemed like a good idea. Decades on, the naive promise of one happy planet has been utterly dashed — and trashed, as extractive tech billionaires have even co-opted space travel — but these works are a reminder that the universe and our world are still miracles, if we’d only look. Since time immemorial, humanity has gazed at the stars and at itself, and dreamed of the eternities in both.
The 14th Shanghai Biennale Cosmos Cinema continues at the Shanghai Power Station of Art (200 Huayuangang Road, Huangpu Qu, Shanghai Shi, China) through March 31. The biennale was curated by Anton Vidokle with Zairong Xiang, Hallie Ayres, Lukas Brasiskis, and Ben Eastham.
Editor’s Note, 12/4/2023: Some travel for the author was paid for by the Power Station of Art.
Editor’s Note, 12/5/2023, 10:42 am EST: An earlier version of this article omitted one curator. This has since been corrected.
